Bodily Nature Research Articles

Метаантропологічні парадигми антиномії філософії права

In the antinomian theory, a significant place is given to the anthropological features of a person. Such a statement takes place because human beings in law often, even sometimes unquestionably, focus on the fact that the main thing for them is the bodily nature of existence. Then all attention is directed to the fact that bodily behavior decides the righteousness or non-righteousness of life, and antinations are sought in this theory, which does not lead to a deontological result. Why does this state occur? The fact is that a person is not only a physical, natural person, but also a supernatural one. This thesis in a godless state was reduced to a simple understanding of man as a part of nature, not all of nature – body, soul, spirit: This is needed by earthly civilization, and not by others. Such positivist ideologies denied for at least two centuries that positive law has the right for existence, but the natural is not, not to mention the supernatural. Therefore, the human soul and spirit were mentioned only as figments of bourgeois theory. At present, the meta-anthropological features are not confidently included in the philosophical and legal science, as signs of former artificial influences on the development of real anthropological reasons. The identification of the real reasons requires the subject’s right to the essence of metaanthropology. On the one hand, the body, soul and spirit are separate, autonomous components, elements of a person. Each of these elements has its own laws of development. There are bodily laws, mental laws, and spiritual laws. If there are laws, then they act according to their imperatives. On the other hand, the body, soul, and spirit are a unified whole of a person, where every part, every organ must obey the mind. In the case when the mind works weakly or not ontologically, then the effectiveness of the autonomous laws of the body, soul, and spirit create either contradictions or insufficient potential opportunities for regulation. Such a weakened metaanthropological human organism produces antinomies. Then it follows that a person is not confident in his behavior – various options for his actions are either true or not true, ontological or non-ontological. In any case, they do not lead to the truth. For this, it is necessary to take into account the deep essence of law, which harmonizes the internal meta-anthropological laws of man, his metaphysical properties. Subjects of law pay the main attention to the implementation of positive law. Therefore, there is an unjustified tendency to neglect natural and supernatural law, their regulatory impulses.

Formation of pedagogical technique of future teachers

The peculiarities of the formation of pedagogical techniques of future teachers have been investigated in the article. Based on the study of psychological and pedagogical literature, the essence of the concept “pedagogical technique” has been revealed. According to the purpose of use, internal (creating the internal experience of the individual, psychological adjustment of a teacher to future activity through the influence on the mind, will, and feelings) and external (embodiment of the inner feelings of a teacher in his/her bodily nature: facial expressions, voice, speech, movements, plasticity) techniques have been considered. The conditions for the formation of pedagogical techniques, such as motivation, development of creative abilities, acquiring primary experience of pedagogical activity, have been disclosed. Factors of influence on the effective formation of pedagogical techniques have been determined. Based on the empirical research (survey), the students’ interpretation of the phenomenon of pedagogical technique has been examined and a comparative analysis of the results of the survey of future teachers has been carried out. Methodological guidelines for future teachers concerning the improvement of pedagogical techniques have been proposed. They are divided into three groups: acquisition of theoretical knowledge (acquisition of professional knowledge at methodological, theoretical, methodical, technological levels; deepening of knowledge about pedagogical technique and psychological and pedagogical activity of a future teacher; formation of systematic knowledge about self-control and self-regulation; familiarization with new learning technologies), formation of practical skills and abilities (mastering methods and techniques of professional activity; developing professional thinking; gaining experience of public speaking at scientific conferences, pedagogical tournaments, roundtables, seminars; modeling cases for the development of pedagogical technique during seminars and practical classes), and systematic professional development (continuous professional development; self-prediction and identification of achieved goals; performing a critical analysis of own abilities using various tests; analysis of strengths and weaknesses of pedagogical technique during pedagogical practice, verification of foreign experience concerning the formation of pedagogical techniques of future teachers). Keywords: pedagogical technique, pedagogical skill, peculiarities and factors of the formation of pedagogical technique, methodological guidelines.

Felt Body as Myth and Reality: On the Bodily Dimension of Felt Sense

This article addresses the function of the felt body in focusing-oriented psychotherapy. Focusing, as defined by its founder Eugene T. Gendlin, innovated the person-centered approach with procedures attending to the bodily “felt sense” of the client’s situation. In a recent series of texts, Campbell Purton questioned the bodily nature of a felt sense, which in his opinion results from a misconception about emotions and language. This article aims to assess the extent to which Purton’s critique is cogent and where, on the contrary, it misses the presence and function of the body in psychotherapy. It is argued that contemporary phenomenological and neo-Jamesian theories of emotions offer ample means of defending the bodily nature of feelings.

Преломление художественных традиций акмеизма в поэзии В. Шаламова

The paper examines the influence of acmeistic patterns on V. Shalamov-poet’s artistic consciousness. The study involves Shalamov’s epistolary and memoirs heritage (letters to N. Mandelstam, N. Stolyarova, essay “Akhmatova,” etc.), where the author reflected on the significance of acmeistic literary tradition, as well as put forward his own understanding of acmeism — not only as an artistic direction, but also as a kind of “life teaching,” a worldview system. One may trace the inheritance of acmeistic principles in Shalamov’s work at different levels. The paper seeks to identify and systematize acmeistic influences in poet’s consciousness. First of all, we are talking about the installation on the “fight for this world” (according to S. Gorodetsky): the multifaceted representation of the phenomena of environmental reality in its colors, forms and subject details. Shalamov inherits this principle, so that the objects of reality play a paramount role in his poetry system and receive no less distinct and large embodiment than in the work of acmeists. Such an arrangement is carried out by Shalamov in contrasting aspects: on the one hand, the imprinting of terrible world in which man barely survives and to which he seeks to resist; оn the other hand, even in the most adverse circumstances of imprisonment, the poet saw and felt the harmony and greatness of nature. The connection with the acmeistic thinking in Shalamov’s works is also expressed in the fact that his images are almost always substantive and tangible (this feature manifested itself as early as in the first poem of “Kolyma notebooks”). As in the lyrics of acmeists, he often refracted the inner world through external, spiritual experiences — through the prism of the subject plan (the principle that was realized brightly in the lyrics of A. Akhmatova). It is not often that the reader finds “pure” lyrical monologues, much more typical for Shalamov`s creative tactics — to characterize the internal state through a chain of real images. Acmeistic logic could be traced in the interpretation of a number of important topics, among which the theme of creativity (characteristic features of its interpretation are shown in the article on the example of poems “Ode to Loaf,” “May it be clumsily uneven…,” “By ungainly prisoner step...”). The paper addresses such a significant aspect (also linking the poet to the acmeistic tradition) as a bodily nature of the figurative world. Finally, important feature of acmeistic thinking, which is inherited by Shalamov, is the obvious appeal of his creativity to the interlocutor, the focus on the reader (this feature is immanent, certainly, not only in the consciousness of akmeists, but it has fundamental significance in their creativity). The study concludes that among the traditions influenced Shalamov-poet, the acmeist becomes one of the most important, most significant artistic and worldview guidelines.

Stance and Being

AbstractThis essay builds upon Rebecca Kukla's constructive treatment of Dennettian stances as embodied coping strategies, to extend a conversation previously initiated by John Haugeland about Daniel Dennett on stances and real patterns and Martin Heidegger on the ontological difference. This comparison is mutually illuminating. It advances three underdeveloped issues in Heidegger: Dasein's ‘bodily nature’, the import of Heidegger's ontological pluralism for object identity, and how clarification of the sense of being in general bears on the manifold senses of being. It more sharply differentiates Kukla's and Dennett's understandings of stances and the real. Finally, it allows for further development of Kukla's account of Dennettian stances as embodied. These developments show greater complexity than what Kukla calls ‘the wide and counterfactually flexible repertoire of bodily positions’ that make up an embodied stance. They also show how different stances are compared and assessed even though Kukla rightly denies the possibility of a normative or explanatory philosophical ‘meta-stance’.

The body expressiveness of the actor in theoretical views and stage practice of the XX – beginning of the XXI century

The purpose of the article is to reveal the specifics of the actor’s bodily expressiveness in the context of the features of theoretical developments and the practical implementation in stage practice of leading theater directors of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Methodology. The study is based on modern art criticism and philosophical concepts of the study of the phenomenon of physicality. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this issue, in the process of researching and analyzing the body expressiveness of the actor, the cultural-historical method is used (to define the concept of “corporeality” in the context of cultural, artistic and philosophical concepts); comparative analysis method (for comparing the methods and methods of representing corporeality in theoretical works and the practical activities of leading theater directors); typological method (to identify factors of formation of actor’s bodily expressiveness); the method of scientific observation and analysis (to determine the specifics of the bodily nature of the means of plastic expression of an actor) and other. Scientific novelty. An art history study of physicality was carried out in the context of the specifics of theatrical art; the process of transition of understanding the actor’s physicality from abstract to dynamic in the context of transformational processes of theatrical art is considered; identified and analyzed general and distinctive value attitudes, as well as forms of representation of acting corporeality in theoretical developments and stage practice of leading directors of the twentieth – early twenty-first century. Conclusions. Analysis of the formation process at the turn of the nineteenth – twentieth centuries. and the further development of the director's theater testifies to the unique transformations of the sociocultural space at the level of bodily-mental changes reflected in the structural, kinetic, and plastic aspects of acting. In the process of complex synthesis, corporeality gradually turns from a means of actor’s expressiveness, with the help of which a story is told in a theater space, into a source of mimetic meanings and meanings in the process of reproducing the art of reality.

‘There is a secret in love’: gender, care and HIV management in South Africa

Research within geography and cognate disciplines have worked to demonstrate the important ways care(ing) informs the emotive, bodily and obligatory nature of gendered health. Although acts of care shape gendered health inequalities and possibilities for reconfiguration, scholarly research tends to focus on individual caregiving and receiving relationships within the domestic sphere, eliding more complicated, contradictory and uncomfortable questions of care that emerge in and through the wider social context. South Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic provides important opportunities to engage contradictions in care since expanded access to antiretroviral therapy allows women to care for their health with increased confidence. Drawing on qualitative research with women in South Africa, we argue that while new HIV management regimes rework opportunities for women to care for and enhance bodily health and wellbeing, they paradoxically conflict with women’s ability to care for and maintain their gendered selves, generating possibilities for harm, conflict and abuse. New biomedical modes of care mean women are often forced to make contradictory decisions between caring for their health but losing idealized notions of the gendered self, or caring for their gendered self, but undermining their possibilities for health. This article concludes that future geographic research on gender-health-place interactions should extend the practice and politics of care by illuminating how constructions, experiences and enactments of gender, health and disease mediate encounters with care and the institutions that attempt to manage them.

The figure of the couple: enabling supplementarity in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958)

ABSTRACT The figure of the couple is a crucial feature of Samuel Beckett’s works that has been widely discussed in the secondary literature and very often viewed as a metaphor of the mind/body distinction. This article provides a re-assessment of the figure of the couple specifically in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and approaches the latter as a necessary imbrication of the material and the mental. To do that, the article focuses on the way the couple manifests itself in the play and discusses the latter in light of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of the supplement and Bernard Stiegler’s work on memory and technics. In the light of these two philosophies, it is shown that the way Beckett represents the couple in his play strongly suggests that the relationship between the material and the mental is inextricable which, in turn, sheds light on the bodily nature of memory and the catalytic role the body plays in the re-experience of the past.

Reading Michelangelo/Michelangelo Reading

This article begins by examining the unusual and significant motif of reading found in Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna (c.1497). Drawing on Neo-Platonic ideas of divine furor in poetry and prophecy, it attempts to connect Michelangelo’s depiction to his own growing interest in poetry, as a reader and, eventually, as a writer. It will suggest that Michelangelo’s engagement with claims about the inspired text shaped this depiction as he wrestled with the contrast between the words of the Tuscan poets and his own hesitant versifying. It will be shown that, while this painting is marked by a considerable originality in conception, it sits in distinct contrast to the laborious, derivative, and bodily nature of both Michelangelo’s early poetic experiments and also much of his later poetic production. This contrast between his poetic and artistic work was further inflected by the bodily labor associated with the visual arts and by the Neo-Platonic discourse of divine inspiration that excluded the visual artist. Turning to subsequent works such as the Pietà (1498–99) and the Sistine Chapel’s prophets and sibyls (after 1508), and contrasting these works with his less inspired poetical constructions, this article will chart Michelangelo’s evolving theoretical engagement with the role which labor and furor each played in his artistic production.

Il testo del samizdat nei testi del samizdat

Self-representation of creative process is a common strategy for several samizdat authors, mainly those who approach literary creation from an aesthetic point of view that is very close to the modernist one. These texts are characterized by peculiar features, such as an emphasis on the author himself and his more or less distinct hypostases (the author often becomes the addressee of his own text); by their physicality, bodily nature, evidence of a paper-made, typewritten text; by a focus on underground writers’ community, their interaction, reciprocal role as readers, advisors, co-authors, as well as on the fundamental role of the underground community of readers, which allows to distribute and multiply samizdat texts.

Bloody war: menstruation, soldiering, and the ‘gender-integrated’ United States military

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of an unprecedented number of women deploying in a new array of roles in the so-called “global war on terror“ and the official opening of combat arms units to women in the United States military, menstruation has served as a key idiom in debates about what it means for women to wage war. In this article, I explore what public curiosity about and military anxieties over soldier menstruation can tell us about the banal and bodily nature of women’s militarization as a deeply affective, sensorial, and embodied process, and the tensions these anxieties reveal within liberal promises of a gender-integrated US military. Drawing on discourse analysis and ethnographic interviews, I examine efforts within US military medicine to hormonally regulate women soldiers’ menstrual cycles as a matter of military operational concern, alongside public narratives by women soldiers who deny the significance of menstruation to the work of soldiering. I argue that both of these discourses enact a conflation between womanhood and menstruation in the debate over women’s role in and at war, in a manner that circumscribes the possibilities of what we can apprehend – and feel – about war and soldiering as gendered experience.

Nourished by experiences: meaning without metaphysics in the poetry of Dannie Abse

<span style="font-size: 14.6667px;">Dannie Abse was one of the most prolific Anglo-Welsh writers of recent times, best known for his poetry and also the author of plays, novels and memoirs. However, the full scope of his writing has yet to be widely acknowledged and some commentators have suggested that his work lacks depth and commitment. The present article provides an exploration and analysis of Abse’s poetry, proposing an understanding of how he did indeed achieve profundity, though not within an explicit, abstract metaphysical framework. Two major aspects of his mature work are considered in detail: his engagement with his Jewish heritage, particularly through its literature; and the sensitive portrayal of his professional medical experiences and the insights that arose from them. His writing offers no totalizing conceptual perspective, but rather a convincing expression of the continued value of the literature of&nbsp; religious traditions for making sense of our lives, a perceptive account of the fragile, bodily nature of our existence, and a timely reminder that science has more limitations than is commonly assumed. The depth – ethical, intellectual and philosophical – and commitment which Abse thus expressed are consonant with the insights of two of the twentieth century’s most original and influential philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein.</span><br>

The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, The Body, and the Eucharist by Emmanuel Falque

Reviewed by: The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, The Body, and the Eucharist by Emmanuel Falque Reed Frey C.O. Emmanuel Falque The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, The Body, and the Eucharist Translated by George Hughes New York: Fordham University Press, 2016 xxv + 300 pages. Hardbound, $125. Paperback, $36. Since 2012, the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Falque’s work has become available to an English-speaking audience through Fordham UP’s Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series. His “philosophical triduum,” completed in French in 2011, is now available entirely in English. Le passeur de Gethsémani. Angoisse, souffrance et mort (1999, available in English as The Guide to Gethsemane: Anxiety, Suffering, Death, 2019) is a study of Christ’s Passion that gives careful attention to the corporality of his suffering and relates this to the universal human experience of anxiety and death. Métamorphose de la finitude. Essai philosophique sur la naissance et la resurrection (2004, available in English as The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection, 2012) tries to understand the nature of a bodily resurrection and its import for humans living out a corporal existence. The text under review here, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, is the final volume in the triduum (originally in French as Les noces de l’Agneau. Essai philosophique sur le corps et l’eucharistie, 2011). Whereas Gethsemane understands Christ’s past taking on of the limitation of finitude, which is is then transformed in the future in Metamorphosis, human embodiment in the present time is the concern of The Wedding Feast. Falque’s 2013 Passer le Rubicon. Philosophie et théologie: Essai sur les les frontières (available in English as Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology, 2017) which argues for a harmonious interaction between philosophy and theology that enables a mutual fruitfulness, serves as a Discourse on Method to his entire project, although it was composed after the triduum was complete. [End Page 88] In each work, Falque, Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Paris, speaks comfortably and competently about both philosophy and theology, seemingly never self-conscious of his movement between the two disciplines. Falque elegantly carries out the task Augustine encourages in De doctrina Christiana: claim for our use whatever thoughts are true, regardless of their origin, just as the Hebrews plundered gold from the Egyptians. Indeed, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb quickly slips between discussions of Tertullian, Irenaeus, and the Gospel of John to inquiries into Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, harvesting from these thinkers many of their fruitful insights. He thus employs a wide variety of sources in what he identifies as a “philosophical study of the body and the eucharist” (xxv), successfully responding to John XXIII’s injunction at the beginning of Vatican II to present the Christian mysteries through the “literary forms of modern thought.” After an insightful analysis of the Van Eyck brothers’ well-known altarpiece at Ghent, Falque begins his “descent into the abyss,” an attempt to probe the mystery of Freud’s unconscious or Kant’s “mass of sensations”—what Falque calls chaos or tohu-bohu— a Hebrew term used in Genesis 1 to describe “formless and void.” He identifies this tohu-bohu as a characteristic feature of the “animality” that was taken on by Christ in the Incarnation. The Lord takes on our animality without taking on “bestiality,” as there is no trace of sin. But in forgetting the bodily nature of the Incarnation, one runs the further risk of angelizing or over-spiritualizing the Eucharist, missing the corporal nature of the Sacred Species. Falque then studies the relationship of eros to agape. He rejects both a univocal treatment of the two (which reduces charity in such a way that it leaves nothing specific to God) or an equivocal treatment (which risks a dangerously distant separation of divine charity and human love). Rather, he puts forth the transforming power of agape for eros, especially in the context of marriage. Along with Benedict XVI, Falque believes there is no fulfillment of marital eros without the guiding hand of God’s agape. So too...

Survey on White-Box Attacks and Solutions

This Research paper provides special white-box attacks and outputs from it. Wearable IoT units perform keep doubtlessly captured, then accessed within an unauthorized behavior due to the fact concerning their bodily nature. That case, they are between white-box attack systems, toughness the opponent may additionally have quantity,visibility about the implementation of the inbuilt crypto system including complete control over its solution platform. The white-box attacks on wearable devices is an assignment without a doubt. To serve as a countermeasure in opposition to these problems in such contexts, here analyzing encryption schemes in imitation of protecting the confidentiality concerning records against white-box attacks. The lightweight encryption, intention in accordance with protecting the confidentiality over data towards white-box attacks is the recently stability good algorithm. In that paper, we read the extraordinary algorithms too.

Cuerpo y comunicación. Reflexiones teóricas y breve estado de la cuestión en México

El estudio del cuerpo en el campo de las ciencias sociales es relativamente reciente. En el contexto latinoamericano empezó a gozar de legitimidad académica a fines de los años ochenta y su desarrollo ha sido mucho mayor ya iniciado el siglo XXI. Existen la sociología del cuerpo y la antropología del cuerpo, y también son muchos los aportes desde miradas filosóficas, sobre todo fenomenológicas. Pero ¿qué sucede con el cuerpo como objeto de estudio de la comunicación? ¿Qué potencial tienen el cuerpo y la corporalidad como objetos de reflexión en nuestro campo de conocimiento? Más allá de los estudios sobre comunicación interpersonal, más teóricos que empíricos, o de las categorías relacionadas con los procesos de comunicación no verbal (kinésica y proxémica), es poca –o al menos insuficiente- la reflexión sobre la esencia corporal de la comunicación, y sobre el cuerpo como vehículo para la comunicación. En estas páginas se presenta una revisión general del cuerpo como objeto de estudio de la comunicación en el contexto mexicano, con base en el análisis documental de los trabajos que aparecen publicados en el Catálogo en línea “Documentación en Ciencias de la Comunicación”. Previamente, presentamos algunos aportes sociológicos y filosóficos sobre el cuerpo que nos parecen pertinentes para situar el debate.

Donʼt Ask Us for Lex. Body Exhibition and Forms of Exclusion

Abstract The essay deals with the many boundaries set and exceeded by Roman Law when human corporeality is involved. In particular, the focus is on the strict correlation between body expression and socio-juridical marginalization, clearly visible in the case of prostitution in ancient Rome, but also in acting and in fighting in the arenas, activities sharing the same goal as prostitution: they were designed to bring pleasure to the senses. These forms of marginalization differ from the inexorable limit, already decrypted by Roman Law, set by humankindʼs bodily nature to the action of Law: Law is not in the position to “have the last word” on matters concerning human life, on which nature alone can “lay down Law.”

Antropological views of Markelin Olesnytskyi

The article deals with the anthropological views of M. Olesnytskyі, a professor at the Kyiv Theological Academy (КТА), whose creative work has not yet been properly studied. It reveals the connection of his anthropological ideas with moral theology and ethical doctrine, which he had taught for a long time in the KTA. Anthropological implications of the moral formation of a human person are also paid attention to, in particular, the dependence of the moral character on anthropological factors. In this context, the writing considers Olesnytskyі’s views on the peculiarities of a person’s body-build. The Kyiv scholar focused on the principles of human corporeality based on natural conditions. In particular, Olesnytskyі stressed that it was the earth’s conditions that formed the bodily nature of man. The article also explores those religious ideas that influenced the anthropological views of the Kyiv scholar, which is quite understandable in view of his Christian outlook. Olenytskyі demonstrates the possibility of effective application of contemporary philosophical studies to the theological and anthropological analysis of man as an individual. In this sense, the conceptual connections of the anthropological views of the Kyiv scholar with the ones of the influential contemporary European philosophers and anthropologists, such as А. Schopenhauer, R. H. Lotze, F. Schleiermacher, E. von Hartmann, and others, become clearly evident. The article emphasizes the significance of the concept of the unconscious for the moral anthropological doctrine of Olesnytskyі; it also argues for the connection of this concept to the leading European doctrines of the unconscious, which were elaborated in philosophy and psychology in the second half of the 19 th century.Article received 18.02.2018

Embodying Compassion: Disability Sport and the Mercy of God

ABSTRACTThe author offers a robustly theological account of compassion, highlighting its bodily nature. Divine mercy is presented as being conveyed through human bodies to remake and enliven both the human agent and recipient. Culminating in a story of a physically and mentally impaired runner, this account of mercy and compassion fleshes out God's mercy, which can be understood as flowing through human bodies in the context of sporting activities. A challenge is thus levied at modern secularized accounts of compassion and mercy, as well as many of the dominant values in contemporary sport—flawless athletic beauty, agonistic competition, and financial success—which have rendered simple acts of intercompetitive compassion and mercy nearly unintelligible.

Transgressie of transformatie

At the end of his review of my latest book Staat van verwarring. Het offer van liefde, Emanuel Rutten poses some critical remarks in regards to my interpretation of eros. In my response, I will show that Rutten neglects several central motives in my understanding of the relationship between eros and philia. The core issue of my book - the (post-)modern confusion in love and relationships - is not the inner tension that we experience between communal being and transgressive being. In fact, I intend to criticize this way of thinking (of postmodern philosophy) and interpretations that associate eros with, what I call, a tradition of 'split ontology' (Freud, Heidegger a.o.). The loss of control in sexual extremism and in kicks is not a real loss of subjectivity, but rather its confused manifestation. Eros implies the abolition and elevation of subjectivity by surrendering oneself to the beloved and shaping a communal life. In my view, eros should be distinguished from lustful desire (epithumia) and its boundless sexual manifestations wherein people lose themselves. Eros can refer to sexual intercourse, but lust as such is not its main goal. Instead of focusing on the transgressive manifestations of sex, I start with pointing out the transformative nature of eros: the death of the natural individual (and its subjectivity) and its resurrection in a higher state of being, in community with someone else. This kind of communal transformation - which can indeed take place in an erotic sexual practice - requires rituals or shared forms between lovers. The central issue of my book is the lack of and the confused need for transformation and shared forms of communal being (of men and women) in our virtual consumer society of 'siblings', particularly in relation to our bodily nature. This is the reason I believe there to be a rise in popularity of bdsmerotica in popular culture, for example in books like Fifty Shades. In its dynamic form, eros has a teleological structure. The lover is dedicated toward the (beautiful) fulfilment or flourishing of the person whom he loves and finds his own fulfilment in this dedication. To clarify this notion of dedication, I introduce the 'Apollonian' concepts of discipline, concentration, attention and creativity, which also apply to sexuality. In fact they are essential to erotic practices like tantra. Instead of focusing on transgression, I stress the 'temporal difference' between philia and eros: philia is more static and is related to daily life, the people with whom you are familiar, the groups to which you belong ... Eros belongs to the adventurous side of life and is related to the significant others to whom you are attracted and with whom you become involved, without knowing exactly what will happen and how it will change you. As such, eros is first and foremost place atopic with respect to one's own life in relation to the other. This does not mean, however, that it always opposes a social order! Nevertheless, the kinds of surrender and bonding that are necessary for an erotic transformation are at odds with the ideal of individual autonomy and the dominance of subjective experiences and kicks in our virtual consumer society. In this sense, we are not living in very erotic times ...

Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852 by Gavin Budge

Reviewed by: Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852 by Gavin Budge Jade Hagan Gavin Budge. Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852. Houndsmills UK and New York: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. Viii + 296. Riding the wave of critical interest in spectrality following Derrida’s Specters of Marx (2003), Gavin Budge begins his study of the “spectral aspects” of nineteenth-century literature with the observation that “the majority of nineteenth-century books about spectres and related topics are by doctors” (1). Accordingly, Budge situates Romanticism’s much discussed interest in visionary experience—including religious visions, apparitions, and drug-induced hallucinations—within medical discourses of the period from 1789 to 1852. More specifically, Budge recovers the widespread cultural currency of John Brown’s medical theories, which understood all disease as a product of either excessive stimulation (asthenia) or insufficient stimulation (sthenia). This historical context allows Budge to recover the medical resonance of terms like “overstimulation” and “irritability,” and to explore how medical ideas about these conditions often coincided with philosophical and literary debates about the nature of perception and the danger of novel reading. This confluence of medical and literary-philosophical notions provides the foundation for Budge’s examination of the ambiguous relationship between bodily materiality and the immateriality of the mind that constitutes Romantic and Victorian interest in the “natural supernatural.” The aim of Budge’s study is threefold. First, Budge hopes to fill a gap in Romantic scholarship, which he claims has hitherto paid little attention to the intercourse between literature and medicine. Second, Budge wants to interrogate the unstable opposition between the Romantics’ belief in the [End Page 275] embodied nature of poetry and the imagination and their simultaneous belief in an immaterial mind or soul. As Budge demonstrates, this opposition was often staged in terms of undesirable bodily specters produced by overwrought nerves versus the kind of transcendent vision claimed by Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge. Budge’s study falls in line with the recent critical trend of locating Romanticism’s claims to transcendent experiences within the material body. However, Budge shows that these writers often attempted to retain a concept of the transcendent in spite of their belief in the bodily nature of perception. Third, Budge aims to underscore the continuities between Romantic and Victorian, British and American writers and artists, insofar as they all drew on—consciously or not—the ideas of Brunonian medicine. Chapter 1 explores how Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels dramatize the need for readerly self-control. Although Radcliffe is often considered a key propagator of the sort of overstimulating novels deemed dangerous to readers’ health by many doctors in the Romantic period, Budge situates Radcliffe within Romantic discourses about the nervous system to demonstrate her awareness of and participation in the Romantic-era project of disciplining enthusiasm. Pointing to her repeated invocation of the language of apparitions and specters in The Mysteries of Udolpho, coupled with her character’s refusal to submit to these figments of the imagination, Budge portrays Radcliffe as an ironic and self-reflexive writer indebted to a neurological concept of the imagination. Chapter 2 begins by looking at the connection between Victorian conceptions of “health” and “manliness” and Wordsworth’s claims to an intuitive understanding of the transcendent. Tracing the influence of Erasmus Darwin’s reformulation of Brunonian medical tenets on Wordsworth’s views of poetry, Budge clarifies Wordsworth’s claim in the preface to Lyrical Ballads that his poetry represents a mild stimulant able to cure overstimulation. While this notion reflects a unified theory of mind and body, Wordsworth could not accept Darwin’s merely materialist view of this continuum. Instead, Budge argues that Wordsworth combined Darwinian ideas with the philosophical intuitionism of the Common Sense school to develop a therapeutic poetics that preserves the predominance of soul in its conception of the self. The longest chapter in the book, and the most persuasive in my opinion, Chapter 3 treats Coleridge’s appropriation of digestive metaphors to defend the healthiness of genius. Through close readings of several enigmatic passages in Coleridge’s notebooks, Budge outlines Coleridge’s view of the imagination as enabling the...