Negation Of Self Research Articles

Constructing Trust in a Collaboration

This article discusses the work of the collective Locus, which explores architecture by constructing spatial experiments in selected contexts. This is a discussion of the embrace of shared objectives leading to an absence of personal attribution and the development of an identity for the collaborative project. Locus’s interest resides in the context of spatial investigation, exploring the basic conceptions of architecture and space. The work accepts that spectators may not experience space conscious of the various spatial ideas discussed in the disciplines of art, architecture and science; however, these ideas are part of the cultural context in which space is experienced. This work extends spatial speculation with an approach that is perceptual, haptic and visceral. The article has a brief description of projects completed by Locus and a discussion of the process of collaboration and the issue of trust and the negation of self in collaboration.

Getting a Head in the Renaissance: Mementos of Lost Love in Boccaccio and Beyond*

AbstractThis essay offers a historian’s reading of Boccaccio’s tale of Lisabetta da Messina (4:5), rethinking it in terms of fourteenth-century ways of understandingvirtùand identity. In analyzing the tale in the context of theDecameron,while reading it against archival material from the period, the deeper context of its discussion of love suggests a reading that makes the tale central to the tragic stories of the fourth day and highlights a lesson about the dangers of passion that make it fit powerfully as the day’s central tale. In the end, love offers many things in theDecameron,but Boccaccio’sbrigataof storytellers and his readers could appreciate a danger more difficult to see today — that the powerful passions associated with lost love and mourning without the support of the groups that surrounded and sustained one’s sense of identity also threatened in the most profound way the negation of self: death.

Zen and the Art of Self-Negation in Samuel Beckett's Not I

and the brain ... raving away on its own ... trying to make sense of it ... or make it stop ... or in the past ... dragging up the past ... flashes from all over ... --Samuel Beckett, Not I Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest ... Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though you are saving your head from fire. --Eihei Dogen Samuel Beckett's late plays stage minimal images of body and mind: a woman sits in an autonomously-moving rocking chair listening to her recorded voice (Rockaby); a disembodied head breathes audibly while three recordings of his voice play (That Time); a mouth suspended in the dark speaks a rapid outpouring of disjointed phrases (Not I). As the actor Donald Davis put it, Not I's visual and aural minimalism (like many of Beckett's plays from the 1970s and 80s) makes Waiting for Godot look an MGM musical. (1) Devoid of whole characters and dynamic action, these brief pieces stage streams of thought and physically restrained human figures surrounded by dark voids. Critics have framed these pieces' baffling simplicity and suffering within European literary and philosophical paradigms ranging from the psychographic landscapes of Dante Alighieri's Inferno and Purgatorio, to the psychoanalytic thinking of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan, to Gilles Deleuze's notions of the exhausted in language and image. (2) Some of these paradigms touch on the ways Beckett pushes to the limits of subjectivity and discursive thought itself, but they tend to do so from within conceptual and metaphysical frameworks. As an alternative lens through which to read these late plays, Japanese Zen Buddhism also suggests the limits of subjectivity and discursive thought but offers a far more concrete paradigm for contextualizing these plays within a tradition of mental and physical practice. (3) Several scholars have noted deep affinities between Beckett's writing and Zen philosophy, from Buddhism's influence on Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism influenced Beckett, to the formal similarities between Beckett's theater and Japanese Noh plays. (4) Paul Foster's Beckett and Zen suggests that Beckett's novels distill the dilemma of existence that Buddhism recognizes as a fundamental human condition but that Beckett fails to find a way out. (5) Combining the enigmatic illogic of Zen with chaos theory, John Kundert-Gibbs's No-Thing is Left to Tell reads Beckett's plays as visual and conceptual riddles that, like koans, baffle the dualistic mind, defeating discursive thought from within. (6) Extending this work beyond Zen ideas to Zen practice, the enigmatic figures who sparsely populate Beckett's late stages appear not as symbolic tropes in the representational and metaphysical traditions of European art, but instead look like ritual enactments of the mind's basic nature. Instead of Dante's damned half-buried in ice, the immobilized figures of That Time and Rockaby begin to look like the meditator in zazen (seated meditation), observing thoughts and perceptions arise in the present moment through restrained bodies. Instead of a spirit condemned forever to pace her own level of Hell, or Jung's example of a woman with the feeling of never having been born, May's prescribed and tightly choreographed pacing in Footfalls begins to resemble a monk in kinhin (walking meditation), repeating slow steps around a cyclical path as deliberate practice. Mouth's refusal to articulate a first-person subject position in Not I, as I will posit here, may even suggest a liberating rather than pathological negation of self. Beneath these surface affinities lies a deeper connection between Beckett's gestures of self-negation and their embodied thought. Beckett's 1973 play Not I in particular, this essay suggests, fleshes out the mental suffering that Buddhism cites as being caused by grasping thoughts or sensations and clinging to the delusion of a persistent self. …

Door

EmilyCarr 722 Child has a small heart, inventing as it goes, a fortune, a funhouse, a there, a bridge. knows, for example, if a man runs off a cliff he won't fall until he realizes his mistake, loves flames and gadgets, participation, now rocking itself on a toy horse, already stupefied, toward oblivion: (intermediate links) a grace note, an appoggiatura, a suspension, gleeful in the face of explosions. Door can be a person. for example, a beautician, palm reader, or chiropractor: thin, dry,and freckled with leaves, so necessary for the balance EmilyCan of the composition, to build a house, so that the street goes on being a street, beyond which the wallpaper can insist roses bloom out of roses. Evolution negation of self as unit reveals the world as a page (gris clair, which is a color like onionskin floating on water) where much has been written and much erased, nothing's blueprint: eyelash and collarbone dissolving into air. arms and wings. they'll mock you one way or the other, the only thing that matters is the pace of substitution, eventually, you'll have to believe all the stories ...

Refuge Upon the Sea: Captivity and Liberty in The Florida Pirate

Refuge Upon the Sea:Captivity and Liberty in The Florida Pirate Daniel Williams (bio) In the final scene of The Florida Pirate, the escaped slave Manuel languished in a Charleston prison, awaiting execution for piracy. When his one remaining friend in either race visited him shortly before his death, he exclaimed: "Ah, is it you, sir? . . . you are the person I most wished to see. How kind it is in you to visit a poor negro! for I am no more now. I am glad to be treated as a rational creature by at least one white man."1 Here, in a jail cell a few hours before his death, Manuel lamented that he was nothing more than "a poor negro." Like the walls around him, the racist conventions that reduced him to being nothing more than an irrational creature awaiting ignoble execution held him captive. A prisoner of both criminal and linguistic codes, he was forced to become what his captors perceived him to be. Yet at his death Manuel also alluded to his having been something greater in life. While declaring his readiness to die, he stated: "I had a weary life of it. I was chased from the land, and took refuge upon the sea; but notwithstanding that, I could not escape the blood-hounds of the Southern States of America." Manuel's "refuge upon the sea" was a pirate ship. After suffering extreme abuse and even mutilation on land, he escaped into piracy, where—according to his narrative—he discovered an alternative social order that allowed him to exist as a free, rational creature. Once able to determine his own fate, he displayed his natural talents, ultimately becoming the captain of a pirate ship. Ironically, his downfall resulted not from southern bloodhounds but from his own rationality. As a rational creature, as a man of reason over passion, he refused to allow his crew to murder the survivors of their last pirate attack, but his compassion directly resulted in his destruction when three of the survivors led an American warship back to his ship's location. Thus, in the movement from slavery to piracy the narrative tracks Manuel's journey of self-realization from subjugation to liberation. Yet the pirate's rational self-governance made him ill suited for either extreme [End Page 71] and inexorably led him back to the ultimate negation of self in the ritual of execution. For English and American readers during the 1820s, the story offered a sensational tale of violence, love, and revenge while featuring two of the period's most dramatic subjects, slavery and piracy. Beneath its textual surface, however, the narrative carried turbulent currents concerning the limits of rationality and the near limitless capacity for human cruelty, mitigated only by momentary acts of charity. Strangely, by juxtaposing their cruel excesses, the narrative linked slavery and piracy. Although representing opposite polarities of human liberty, the two displayed similar levels of ruthless brutality and vicious self-interest. Manuel's fictional tale, The Florida Pirate, was first presented to Anglo-American readers in the August 1821 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. The story was engaging enough that within a year Sylvester T. Goss, a New Hampshire printer in Haverhill, advertised his own edition of the story as the Life and Adventures of Manuel, the Florida Pirate. The following year W. Borradaile, a New York printer, thought the story was marketable enough to invest his own time and energy in producing three separate editions, all of which were printed in 1823 under the title The Florida Pirate, or An Account of the a Cruise in the Schooner Esparanza. Five years later another New York printer, S. King, still considered the story a marketable commodity and produced two separate editions in 1828. Six years later, in 1834, two Pittsburgh printers, Felt and Cook, published the final American edition of The Florida Pirate. Thus, in a little more than a decade, and at a time when few texts were reprinted in multiple editions, Manuel's story of slavery and piracy was printed a total of nine times on both sides of the Atlantic. Such relative frequency of publication clearly indicates that several American...

Anne Bradstreet's “personal” protestant poetics

Bradstreet's adaptation in her works of a well-known and highly politicized Protestant aesthetics based on ut pictura poesis, most commonly identified in the visual arts, accounts for her treatment of historical subjects in her supposedly “public” elegies and poems and of her domestic life in the “personal” poems and prose works. In all of these works, but especially in her later posthumously published ones, her depiction of herself as a writing woman, her “simple” poetics, and her persistent focus on the transient aspects of human existence suggest an ideologically chosen enclosure in a domestic economy subsequent generations refine and redefine as a “woman's place.” But, Bradstreet's negation of self and subject, the negation of self as subject, is instead the referent for interpretation, for another reader's construction of a text to be read

Psychosocial Predictors of Cancer and Internal Diseases

In 1965, questionnaire data were obtained for 1,353 inhabitants of a Yugoslavian town on the following variables: blocked expression of feelings and needs; psychosocial stress in the form of either lasting depression and hopelessness or lasting anger and irritation; harmonization and idealization, with negation of self; rational orientation with repression of emotions; psychopathological symptoms; "explosive behavior", including exposure to adverse environmental conditions, abuse of medicines etc, ignoring signs of illness, hyperactivity. These variables were related to the incidence of cancer and internal diseases over the next 10 years.A discriminant analysis yielded 93% correct predictions. The results, beyond their theoretical significance, open up substantive possibilities of early recogninition as well as preventive and curative sociopsychotherapy of cancer and internal diseases.