If to be sympathetic to others is a prerequisite for harmonious community, how does this function... more If to be sympathetic to others is a prerequisite for harmonious community, how does this function in the absence of identities in common? In his figurations of sympathy as auto-poetic affectivity, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself offers a way; exceeding the humanist register on which much thinking about community relies. Five hundred thousand iridescent bodies move as a coordinated phalanx in Mid-Atlantic: mega-shoals of teleost fish. A swooping mass of starlings wheel over the fields at twilight. Above them, nebulae composed of glowing dust particles coherently present themselves to human eyes as stars. We cannot say if mackerel know anything of nebulae. But when we write and read about them, such formations elicit our sympathies. They are excruciatingly beautiful examples of how poorly we conceptualise the relationships of parts and wholes. It takes considerable effort to imagine any precise connection between the fishes, the starlings and the cradles of the stars. They seem very distant from our conceptions of our own shoal, "our community". "Our community"? Who is this "we"? Whitman's Song of Myself answers with maximum inclusivity: the carpenter, the prostitute, the prize-fighter, the red girl, the child, the runaway slave. In its desire to speak to, and for, the many different individuals of the American en masse, Whitman's song might just as happily have been titled "Symphony of all Others". Renowned for its immense optimism about the social power of sympathy it is an exuberant celebration of the "common people", a refusal to countenance "a single person slighted or left away" (sec.19). Declaring "I am he attesting sympathy" (sec.22), the poem's democratic and compassionate persona offers a remarkable catalogue of America's diversity, moving from contralto to carpenter, duck shooter to deacon, culminating in the affirmation: "And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,/ And of these one and all I weave the song of myself" (sec. 15). Perhaps no other poet has aspired to contain such "multitudes" or to embrace a geography of selfhood that is so expansively drawn.
This paper argues that new direction can be found for the modernist concept of stream of consciou... more This paper argues that new direction can be found for the modernist concept of stream of consciousness by returning to William James’s original insights in Principles of Psychology (1890). I begin by briefly outlining James’s idea of the “stream of thought” in order to identify the nature of its relationship to the literary technique. I go on to show how early readings of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) were inspired by a modernist cognizance of “stream of consciousness” narration but were “ableist” in their treatment of Benjy Compson’s narrative. More recently, these shortcomings have been redressed from a literary disability studies perspective but not without importing unwarranted humanist values into Faulkner’s presentation of Benjy. To develop a reading of cognitive impairment which is neither dehumanising nor humanist, I return to James’s “stream of thought” to show how it can be reconciled with a recent (Deleuzian) disability studies account of “impersonal li...
Nietzsche and the Politics of the "Nearest Things" No wanderer lived so close to his shadow as Ni... more Nietzsche and the Politics of the "Nearest Things" No wanderer lived so close to his shadow as Nietzsche lived to his. His philosophy secures connections to the un-writable, to the opacity that accompanies the forms and words through which ideas come to be. Half-blind and gripped by crushing pressure inside his skull, Nietzsche picked his way through the Alpine landscape, alert to what his afflictions progressively revealed: a nethermost existence, difficult to reach but close by and with which communication is possible. The "air of the heights" that pervades his writing does not bequeath lofty abstractions of a supersensible vocation but the breath of the outside, the stirring of unguessed-at things. Philosophy as I have understood it and lived so far, is choosing to live in ice and high mountainsseeking out everything alien and questionable in existence, everything that previously has been exiled by morality. (EH, "Foreword," 3). i In the winter of 1879, at the nadir of his vitality and scarcely able to see three steps ahead of him, Nietzsche produced The Wanderer and his Shadow, a text framed by a discussion of things hitherto muted and poorly perceived. At the close of this text, the shadow declares to the wanderer: "Of all that you have put forward, nothing has pleased me more than a promise you have made: You want again to become a good neighbour to the things nearest to you. This will benefit us poor shadows too". The notion of the "nearest things," introduced in this work as the "smallest, most everyday" concerns, seems to allude to the most obvious of immediacies such as eating, sleeping and dividing up the day. That such matters should claim philosophical attention is strongly emphasised in Nietzsche's writings but the question of how to think them is never explicitly developed and it is not until his final work that it once again achieves prominence.
In proximity to Epicurus: Nietzsche's discovery of the past within We need history, for the past ... more In proximity to Epicurus: Nietzsche's discovery of the past within We need history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we sense of this continued flowing […]The last three centuries very probably still continue to live on, in all their cultural colours and cultural refractions, close beside us: they want only to be discovered. (AOM, 223) 1 A few short millennia before the ocean of impersonal forces arrayed a small assortment of its parts into a man called Friedrich Nietzsche, it spent a little time disporting itself before the senses of Epicurus. It presented itself in the guise of the sea, and sky, and clouds, and mineral formations, as animals large and small, as ideas, as feelings, as specific kinds of thoughts and mood. Later when these impersonal forces folded some tiny part of themselves into Nietzsche, something of their past presence in Epicurus's world stirred within his own: Epicurus.-Yes, I am proud of the fact that I experience [empfinden] the character of Epicurus differently to perhaps anyone else, and enjoy in all that I read and hear of him the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity:-I see his eye gazing out on a vast, white sea, over the rocks along the shoreline where the sun lies, whilst big and small animals play in its light, secure and serene like this light and that eye itself. Such happiness could only have been invented by one who is suffering continually, the happiness of an eye looking out on a becalmed sea of existence and which can now no longer tire of its surface, and the colourful, tender, quivering skin of the sea. Never before has sensuality been so modest. (GS 45) Contemplating the delicate shuddering waves, Epicurus enjoys a serene happiness, which across the centuries will lap at the shore of a Genovese coast on another restful summer day (KSA 8/527/30[31]). "Experiencing the character" of the ancient Greek philosopher from Samos, Nietzsche writes from the Italian Riviera in 1881 as one who inhabits the atmosphere of the afternoon of antiquity, his physiology attuned to the constellation of affects named "Epicurus". "Den Charakter Epikur's anders .. empfinden" involves a physical encounter with "temperament" or "nature" (Charakter), "empfinden" meaning "to sense", "perceive", 1 Translations are my own.
Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, 2017
Abstract:Franz Kafka's five-year correspondence with Felice Bauer is marked by an unusual fas... more Abstract:Franz Kafka's five-year correspondence with Felice Bauer is marked by an unusual fascination with the practice of writing and receiving letters and with the minutiae of the everyday. I suggest that Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the "nearest things" illuminates Kafka's letter-writing as an embodied style or "orientation" of thought.
From "The Birth of Tragedy" to his experimental "physiology of art", Nietzsch... more From "The Birth of Tragedy" to his experimental "physiology of art", Nietzsche examines the aesthetic, erotic and sacred dimensions of rapture, hinting at how an ecstatic philosophy is realized in his elusive doctrine of Eternal Return. Jill Marsden pursues the implications of this legacy.
In this essay I explore what might be meant by the “nearest things” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In... more In this essay I explore what might be meant by the “nearest things” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In the first part of the essay I contextualise Nietzsche’s concerns with “the closest things of all” in the “free spirit” period (1878–1882) and raise the question of how knowledge of them is possible. This idea is developed in the second part of the paper in relation to the claim that dominant (Platonic/Christian) habits of thought impede our understanding of the body. In the third section, I suggest that Nietzsche’s interest in Epicurean thinking in this period enables us to situate the nearest things within the political aesthetics of a transfigured physis. In the final section, I examine how Nietzsche’s 1881 notes on eternal return provide a less-well known locus for his philosophy of the nearest things, one which suggests that to “incorporate” eternal return we need to become “good neighbours” to what is close.
This paper seeks to establish what is distinctive about Will Self's return to techniques of liter... more This paper seeks to establish what is distinctive about Will Self's return to techniques of literary modernism in his novel Umbrella (2012). Despite deploying narrative styles typically reserved for the depiction of 'inner' worlds, Self's novel seems more concerned with the concept of thought as a stream than with the psychological introspection afforded by 'stream of consciousness' narration. Drawing on William James's founding ideas about the 'stream of thought' in Principles of Psychology (1890), this article suggests that Self's version of modernism owes a greater debt to James's philosophy of embodied cognition than to the interior monologue as a literary form. Through a range of stylistic anomalies, including abrupt shifts in grammatical congruence, idiosyncratic italicisation, and surprising jumps mid-sentence between different stories, Self dismantles the novelistic illusion of the isolated mind, returning thinking to a transpersonal affective stream on which conceptual order floats. In capturing a sense of the interflow between mind, body and world, his stream of consciousness serves new political and philosophical ends, challenging us to ask what our bodies are doing and where our minds are going in our present time.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1997
Examinant le cas de paranoaia du president Schreber etudie par Freud et la description dionysiaqu... more Examinant le cas de paranoaia du president Schreber etudie par Freud et la description dionysiaque de la possibilite d'une communication infinie chez Nietzsche, l'A. souleve la problematique du devenir autrui qui consiste a faire apparaitre un nouveau principe de communication a travers la dissolution de l'identite de soi dans la multiplicite. Se referant a P. Klossowski, l'A. interroge la coherence du soi des lors qu'il est menace de s'annihiler
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1996
Analyse de l'idee de construction du sexe, par opposition a sa definition naturelle, dans l&#... more Analyse de l'idee de construction du sexe, par opposition a sa definition naturelle, dans l'ouvrage de J. Butler intitule «Bodies that matter» (1993) et dans l'ouvrage de R. Diprose intitule «The bodies of women» (1994). Si toutes deux etudient en termes foucaldiens les discours qui modelent l'incarnation sexuee, elles se distinguent quant a leur conception de la materialite de la difference sexuelle
Page 1. 22 jill marsden 2 Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism JILL MARSDEN Throughout his philo... more Page 1. 22 jill marsden 2 Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism JILL MARSDEN Throughout his philosophical corpus, Nietzsche acknowledges that our habits of thought constitute what we recognize as thought. Much of what ...
The authors argue that attention to the Freudian and Derridean concepts of Nachtr®aglichkeit and ... more The authors argue that attention to the Freudian and Derridean concepts of Nachtr®aglichkeit and diff¥erance might challenge the implicit assumption of the linear development of traumatic stress from originary event to presenting symptoms. These concepts raise fundamental questions as to the origin of trauma and its ontological status. It is suggested that the psychical reality of retro-causality necessitates a reorientation of current thought about traumatic stress to reflect the paradoxical temporal dynamics of postmodernity.
... the Sophists. As skillfully illus-trated by Eric A. Havelock, the practice of alphabetic writ... more ... the Sophists. As skillfully illus-trated by Eric A. Havelock, the practice of alphabetic writing in general, and specifically this transcription of Homer's poems, exercised a decisive influence on the history of Western culture. This ...
[Sexuality] is badly explained by the binary organisation of the sexes, and just as badly by a bi... more [Sexuality] is badly explained by the binary organisation of the sexes, and just as badly by a bisexual organisation within each sex. Sexuality brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings... Sexuality is the production of a thousand sexes, which are so ...
If to be sympathetic to others is a prerequisite for harmonious community, how does this function... more If to be sympathetic to others is a prerequisite for harmonious community, how does this function in the absence of identities in common? In his figurations of sympathy as auto-poetic affectivity, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself offers a way; exceeding the humanist register on which much thinking about community relies. Five hundred thousand iridescent bodies move as a coordinated phalanx in Mid-Atlantic: mega-shoals of teleost fish. A swooping mass of starlings wheel over the fields at twilight. Above them, nebulae composed of glowing dust particles coherently present themselves to human eyes as stars. We cannot say if mackerel know anything of nebulae. But when we write and read about them, such formations elicit our sympathies. They are excruciatingly beautiful examples of how poorly we conceptualise the relationships of parts and wholes. It takes considerable effort to imagine any precise connection between the fishes, the starlings and the cradles of the stars. They seem very distant from our conceptions of our own shoal, "our community". "Our community"? Who is this "we"? Whitman's Song of Myself answers with maximum inclusivity: the carpenter, the prostitute, the prize-fighter, the red girl, the child, the runaway slave. In its desire to speak to, and for, the many different individuals of the American en masse, Whitman's song might just as happily have been titled "Symphony of all Others". Renowned for its immense optimism about the social power of sympathy it is an exuberant celebration of the "common people", a refusal to countenance "a single person slighted or left away" (sec.19). Declaring "I am he attesting sympathy" (sec.22), the poem's democratic and compassionate persona offers a remarkable catalogue of America's diversity, moving from contralto to carpenter, duck shooter to deacon, culminating in the affirmation: "And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,/ And of these one and all I weave the song of myself" (sec. 15). Perhaps no other poet has aspired to contain such "multitudes" or to embrace a geography of selfhood that is so expansively drawn.
This paper argues that new direction can be found for the modernist concept of stream of consciou... more This paper argues that new direction can be found for the modernist concept of stream of consciousness by returning to William James’s original insights in Principles of Psychology (1890). I begin by briefly outlining James’s idea of the “stream of thought” in order to identify the nature of its relationship to the literary technique. I go on to show how early readings of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) were inspired by a modernist cognizance of “stream of consciousness” narration but were “ableist” in their treatment of Benjy Compson’s narrative. More recently, these shortcomings have been redressed from a literary disability studies perspective but not without importing unwarranted humanist values into Faulkner’s presentation of Benjy. To develop a reading of cognitive impairment which is neither dehumanising nor humanist, I return to James’s “stream of thought” to show how it can be reconciled with a recent (Deleuzian) disability studies account of “impersonal li...
Nietzsche and the Politics of the "Nearest Things" No wanderer lived so close to his shadow as Ni... more Nietzsche and the Politics of the "Nearest Things" No wanderer lived so close to his shadow as Nietzsche lived to his. His philosophy secures connections to the un-writable, to the opacity that accompanies the forms and words through which ideas come to be. Half-blind and gripped by crushing pressure inside his skull, Nietzsche picked his way through the Alpine landscape, alert to what his afflictions progressively revealed: a nethermost existence, difficult to reach but close by and with which communication is possible. The "air of the heights" that pervades his writing does not bequeath lofty abstractions of a supersensible vocation but the breath of the outside, the stirring of unguessed-at things. Philosophy as I have understood it and lived so far, is choosing to live in ice and high mountainsseeking out everything alien and questionable in existence, everything that previously has been exiled by morality. (EH, "Foreword," 3). i In the winter of 1879, at the nadir of his vitality and scarcely able to see three steps ahead of him, Nietzsche produced The Wanderer and his Shadow, a text framed by a discussion of things hitherto muted and poorly perceived. At the close of this text, the shadow declares to the wanderer: "Of all that you have put forward, nothing has pleased me more than a promise you have made: You want again to become a good neighbour to the things nearest to you. This will benefit us poor shadows too". The notion of the "nearest things," introduced in this work as the "smallest, most everyday" concerns, seems to allude to the most obvious of immediacies such as eating, sleeping and dividing up the day. That such matters should claim philosophical attention is strongly emphasised in Nietzsche's writings but the question of how to think them is never explicitly developed and it is not until his final work that it once again achieves prominence.
In proximity to Epicurus: Nietzsche's discovery of the past within We need history, for the past ... more In proximity to Epicurus: Nietzsche's discovery of the past within We need history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we sense of this continued flowing […]The last three centuries very probably still continue to live on, in all their cultural colours and cultural refractions, close beside us: they want only to be discovered. (AOM, 223) 1 A few short millennia before the ocean of impersonal forces arrayed a small assortment of its parts into a man called Friedrich Nietzsche, it spent a little time disporting itself before the senses of Epicurus. It presented itself in the guise of the sea, and sky, and clouds, and mineral formations, as animals large and small, as ideas, as feelings, as specific kinds of thoughts and mood. Later when these impersonal forces folded some tiny part of themselves into Nietzsche, something of their past presence in Epicurus's world stirred within his own: Epicurus.-Yes, I am proud of the fact that I experience [empfinden] the character of Epicurus differently to perhaps anyone else, and enjoy in all that I read and hear of him the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity:-I see his eye gazing out on a vast, white sea, over the rocks along the shoreline where the sun lies, whilst big and small animals play in its light, secure and serene like this light and that eye itself. Such happiness could only have been invented by one who is suffering continually, the happiness of an eye looking out on a becalmed sea of existence and which can now no longer tire of its surface, and the colourful, tender, quivering skin of the sea. Never before has sensuality been so modest. (GS 45) Contemplating the delicate shuddering waves, Epicurus enjoys a serene happiness, which across the centuries will lap at the shore of a Genovese coast on another restful summer day (KSA 8/527/30[31]). "Experiencing the character" of the ancient Greek philosopher from Samos, Nietzsche writes from the Italian Riviera in 1881 as one who inhabits the atmosphere of the afternoon of antiquity, his physiology attuned to the constellation of affects named "Epicurus". "Den Charakter Epikur's anders .. empfinden" involves a physical encounter with "temperament" or "nature" (Charakter), "empfinden" meaning "to sense", "perceive", 1 Translations are my own.
Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, 2017
Abstract:Franz Kafka's five-year correspondence with Felice Bauer is marked by an unusual fas... more Abstract:Franz Kafka's five-year correspondence with Felice Bauer is marked by an unusual fascination with the practice of writing and receiving letters and with the minutiae of the everyday. I suggest that Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the "nearest things" illuminates Kafka's letter-writing as an embodied style or "orientation" of thought.
From "The Birth of Tragedy" to his experimental "physiology of art", Nietzsch... more From "The Birth of Tragedy" to his experimental "physiology of art", Nietzsche examines the aesthetic, erotic and sacred dimensions of rapture, hinting at how an ecstatic philosophy is realized in his elusive doctrine of Eternal Return. Jill Marsden pursues the implications of this legacy.
In this essay I explore what might be meant by the “nearest things” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In... more In this essay I explore what might be meant by the “nearest things” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In the first part of the essay I contextualise Nietzsche’s concerns with “the closest things of all” in the “free spirit” period (1878–1882) and raise the question of how knowledge of them is possible. This idea is developed in the second part of the paper in relation to the claim that dominant (Platonic/Christian) habits of thought impede our understanding of the body. In the third section, I suggest that Nietzsche’s interest in Epicurean thinking in this period enables us to situate the nearest things within the political aesthetics of a transfigured physis. In the final section, I examine how Nietzsche’s 1881 notes on eternal return provide a less-well known locus for his philosophy of the nearest things, one which suggests that to “incorporate” eternal return we need to become “good neighbours” to what is close.
This paper seeks to establish what is distinctive about Will Self's return to techniques of liter... more This paper seeks to establish what is distinctive about Will Self's return to techniques of literary modernism in his novel Umbrella (2012). Despite deploying narrative styles typically reserved for the depiction of 'inner' worlds, Self's novel seems more concerned with the concept of thought as a stream than with the psychological introspection afforded by 'stream of consciousness' narration. Drawing on William James's founding ideas about the 'stream of thought' in Principles of Psychology (1890), this article suggests that Self's version of modernism owes a greater debt to James's philosophy of embodied cognition than to the interior monologue as a literary form. Through a range of stylistic anomalies, including abrupt shifts in grammatical congruence, idiosyncratic italicisation, and surprising jumps mid-sentence between different stories, Self dismantles the novelistic illusion of the isolated mind, returning thinking to a transpersonal affective stream on which conceptual order floats. In capturing a sense of the interflow between mind, body and world, his stream of consciousness serves new political and philosophical ends, challenging us to ask what our bodies are doing and where our minds are going in our present time.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1997
Examinant le cas de paranoaia du president Schreber etudie par Freud et la description dionysiaqu... more Examinant le cas de paranoaia du president Schreber etudie par Freud et la description dionysiaque de la possibilite d'une communication infinie chez Nietzsche, l'A. souleve la problematique du devenir autrui qui consiste a faire apparaitre un nouveau principe de communication a travers la dissolution de l'identite de soi dans la multiplicite. Se referant a P. Klossowski, l'A. interroge la coherence du soi des lors qu'il est menace de s'annihiler
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1996
Analyse de l'idee de construction du sexe, par opposition a sa definition naturelle, dans l&#... more Analyse de l'idee de construction du sexe, par opposition a sa definition naturelle, dans l'ouvrage de J. Butler intitule «Bodies that matter» (1993) et dans l'ouvrage de R. Diprose intitule «The bodies of women» (1994). Si toutes deux etudient en termes foucaldiens les discours qui modelent l'incarnation sexuee, elles se distinguent quant a leur conception de la materialite de la difference sexuelle
Page 1. 22 jill marsden 2 Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism JILL MARSDEN Throughout his philo... more Page 1. 22 jill marsden 2 Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism JILL MARSDEN Throughout his philosophical corpus, Nietzsche acknowledges that our habits of thought constitute what we recognize as thought. Much of what ...
The authors argue that attention to the Freudian and Derridean concepts of Nachtr®aglichkeit and ... more The authors argue that attention to the Freudian and Derridean concepts of Nachtr®aglichkeit and diff¥erance might challenge the implicit assumption of the linear development of traumatic stress from originary event to presenting symptoms. These concepts raise fundamental questions as to the origin of trauma and its ontological status. It is suggested that the psychical reality of retro-causality necessitates a reorientation of current thought about traumatic stress to reflect the paradoxical temporal dynamics of postmodernity.
... the Sophists. As skillfully illus-trated by Eric A. Havelock, the practice of alphabetic writ... more ... the Sophists. As skillfully illus-trated by Eric A. Havelock, the practice of alphabetic writing in general, and specifically this transcription of Homer's poems, exercised a decisive influence on the history of Western culture. This ...
[Sexuality] is badly explained by the binary organisation of the sexes, and just as badly by a bi... more [Sexuality] is badly explained by the binary organisation of the sexes, and just as badly by a bisexual organisation within each sex. Sexuality brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings... Sexuality is the production of a thousand sexes, which are so ...
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