Ontological Crisis Research Articles

La fenomenología de Husserl como razón práctico/existencial: el mundo de la vida como fundamento del proyecto ilustrado husserliano de ciencia estricta

Este artículo afirma que la fenomenología, realización de la idea de filosofía como ciencia estricta, es la respuesta husserliana a la crisis epistemológica y ontológica que padecen la ciencia y la filosofía de su tiempo. Pero el sentido último de esta ciencia estricta fenomenológica es atender los problemas existenciales del ser humano debidos al divorcio establecido entre razón y existencia por la crisis Fin de Siècle. El proyecto fenomenológico ilustrado tiene para Husserl sobre todo un sentido práctico/existencial: fundamentar la idea de Europa como ideal de una existencia humana basada en ideas de razón, con sentido. La respuesta a la crisis sólo puede ser la filosofía como ciencia estricta fundada sobre la experiencia antepredicativa del mundo de la vida en la que (en la cual) se nos dan las cosas mismas, ‘lo que’ (nos) son primariamente. La ciencia volverá a tener significado humano cuando se fundamente sobre ese ámbito originario de experiencia, verdadera fuente de todo sentido y categoría.

“An Ontological Crisis”: Sartre’s Gaze and Being-for-Others in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

SummaryThis article on Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light uses as its point of departure her remark that “there must be an ontological crisis [for play-whites] that nobody can talk about, because officially they don’t exist”. Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of Being-for-Others, as well as W.E.B. du Bois’s and Franz Fanon’s work on black double consciousness, frame my contention that, for the two central characters Helen and Marion, the gaze of other people is at the root of their “ontological crisis” or destabilisation of being. In the article I develop my own interpretation of Sartre’s theory of the gaze and distinguish between two potential forms of the look, which I call the prejudiced-look and the critical-look. I argue that the experience of for-Others, depending on the nature of the Sartrean look, has the potential to trigger either an inescapable alienation from self (in the case of Helen) or a development of self (in the case of Marion). So, for instance, Helen’s exposure to the prejudiced white gaze results in her physical and mental deterioration, whereas Marion’s experience of the critical gaze enables constructive internal changes. Ultimately, my article aims to shed new light on the complex dynamics of the gaze, intersubjectivity, and ontological anxiety in the racially charged space of South Africa.

Grounding our subjectivity in the semiotic web

In their responses to my framing of the ecological crisis as an ontological crisis, my interlocutors raise questions about the relationship between ontology and ethics; whether and how attention to affect and a reimagined ontology can cope with the demands that we face when thinking of ethics on a planetary scale; the implications of contemporary actions in deep time; and whether thinking through affect leads us to a perspective divorced from History. In response to Gandy and Jasper, I address misplaced charges of anthropocentrism, claims I abandon the subject, and claims I privilege affect in a way that ignores reason. In response to Sharp, Stark, and Clark, I elaborate (a) the ways in which we can proceed from a reimagined ontology to ethics through a more critical engagement with contemporary scholars (e.g. Buchanan and Wehelyie, who leaven the concept of assemblage), (b) the selective engagement of western philosophers as a kind of pars destruens to a western concept of the subject, and (c) the richness of an approach based on semiosis, which uncovers the communicative relations between a vast array of actors and actants and offers both a different vision of plenitude and the potential for wider range of alliances. I propose this as a prolegomenon to a reimagined future and expanded sense of human subjectivity—one which would acknowledge, celebrate, and promote a maximal biodiversity, in recognition of the ultimate dependence of humans on the workings of nonhuman others.

Rethinking the subject, reimagining worlds

The ecological crisis is also an ontological crisis. It raises questions about our ethical response-ability to this world, calling for a rethinking of the human–nature divide. Vitalist approaches and scholarship on the affective turn have shifted our understanding of our relations to nonhuman others, but they remain constrained: limited to proximate attachments; ambivalent or agnostic in the face of conflict; unable to move beyond the celebration of a lively earth. At issue I feel is a methodological individualism that haunts these offerings when confronted with questions of the ethical composition of a larger whole. Building upon Sharp’s invitation to explore ‘our continuity with nonhuman agencies’, I investigate the ethical basis for a reimagined subject in a series of becomings: the becoming nature of God, becoming animal of man, and becoming sign of earth. Drawing on the writings of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Peirce, I rework this familiar terrain on two counts. First, I examine how the content of each becoming invokes distinct relational dynamics and complicates the ‘problem of composition’. Second, I draw on Spinoza’s differentiated concept of power (as potentia and potestas) and the concept of the composite individual to suggest an alternative way of framing our collaborations with the nonhuman world.

Painting and Politics in El pintor de su deshonra: Monarchy As a Work of Art

Painting and politics are closely allied in Calderón’s El pintor de su deshonra. Don Juan Roca is a dishonoured husband and a failed artist whose attempt to render Serafina’s divine perfection on canvas by painting her beauty provokes an ontological crisis that manifests itself in political terms as a crisis of monarchy. As the orthogonals of a comedia structured according to the principles of linear perspective, don Juan, don Álvaro and the Prince converge on Serafina, whose tragic death in the vanishing point of the play calls into question a theocratic understanding of the ideal Christian prince, thereby freeing virtue and power to relate to each other like the figures in a Renaissance canvas. Having seen the blood-drenched destruction brought about in part by his desire to possess the divine as symbolized in the figure of Serafina, the Prince then offers his hand in marriage to Porcia and takes his place in the final ‘painting’ of the play: which is that of monarchy as a work of art.

English

John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” is a prime example of a postmodernist short fiction. The poetics of the work is mainly concerned with questions of ontology and frequently seeks to foreground this notion in different ways so much so that the reader gets lost in a funhouse of reading. Accordingly, the story has been divided into separate worlds, each trying to call into attention its own ontological existence and significance. Barth’s story self-consciously implements certain techniques at different levels of his work to foreground world formation and draw the reader’s attention towards the worlds of the text. His story foregrounds different planes, each of which stands independently as an ontological world: the world of language and text, the metafictional level, the projected world level, and the external world of the author. However, the resultant ontological ruptures, which are intentionally induced, cause various complications in the narrative. Ontologies are presented as unstable, and they intrude into one another. This brings about confusion, since the horizons of two or more worlds meet at a common point which brings about a critical state of affairs – ontological crisis. The above confusion, it is argued, makes an ontological funhouse in which the reader ‘gets lost.’ This leads to a sense of uncertainty regarding the ontologies, that is, they flicker between existence and nonexistence. The texture of “Lost in the Funhouse” is thus suffused with such ontological indeterminacy. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/GEMA-2015-1501-13

“Everything Always Works”: Continuity as a Source of Disaster Preparedness Problems

This paper offers new theoretical explanations about the problems with disaster preparedness efforts for vulnerable publics. Findings were developed through an inductive, grounded theory study conducted among staff and students at a large university in Southern California. Disaster preparedness is traditionally conceptualized as a collection of practices consisting of the collection and storage of material objects, resources, knowledge, and plans. People who do not engage in these activities in known risk areas are often blamed for the negative consequences of disaster. Here it is argued that preparedness reflects an assumed continuity between pre-and post-disaster contexts. This is closely tied to the pervasive need for social actors to maintain a sense of continuity in everyday life otherwise known as ontological security. The continuity of infrastructure and everyday life are major obstacles to the engagement of preparedness efforts for people. This study shows the notion of a potential catastrophe presents as an ontological crisis that impedes people's preparedness practices on both organizational and individual levels. It also demonstrates how the very idea of preparedness as directly connected to successful response is a product of the particular societal context of a risk area.

Imagining a dialectical African modernity: Achebe's ontological hopes, Sembene's machines, Mda's epistemological redness

In Chinua Achebe's book of essays Hopes and Impediments, he asserts that Nigeria's failure to ‘develop’ and ‘modernise’ like Japan is because of a ‘failure of imagination’. Yet for many Africans, modernity is a tainted ‘gift’ because it was introduced into the African continent along with European colonial capitalism which simultaneously caused an ontological crisis of self. Although many Africans want to ‘catch up’ with the West, how is it possible when Western technological superiority was equated with white racial superiority? Achebe declares that, as Africans ‘begin their journey into the strange, revolutionary world of modernization’, literature should function as guide. Hence, I examine Ousmane Sembene's novel God's Bits of Wood which depicts Africans laying claim to ‘race-less’, ‘language-less’ ‘machines’. But does (Western) technology change culture? Can African culture appropriate technology to form a dialectical African modernity? If so, what role does ‘tradition’ play? In Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness, we witness the emergence of a traditional modernity made possible by a dialectical epistemology.

Technology, Excretion and the Good Life

This paper discusses an ontological crisis that emerges from the modern life which is inherently related to modern technology, with insights from Heidegger's ontology of technology and my observations in Ladakh. There are two central underlying assumptions in my approach:− “Technological” progress lies at the heart of earning the identity of being a developed country.− The way we relate to objects of knowledge, determines the nature of knowledge.Heidegger shows that what qualifies as science and technology for the minority world today, has not always been the way it was conceived. The validity and truth of modern knowledge is held under profound suspicion because only that which can be measured, calculated, stored, called-upon and challenged to deliver comes into being in this worldview. This tendency pervades every aspect of our lifestyles including mundane acts such as excretion. It is through such mundane acts, that relations with existence as a whole are formed and maintained and progressive knowledge is possible; knowledge which makessustainability and the good life possible.Key Word: Technology, Excretion, Ladakhi, Heidegger's Ontology of Technology.

Hrvatska kratka priča i Antun Gustav Matoš

Antun Gustav Matoš has affirmed the Croatian short story and that is why his short story collections have initiated a major „breakthrough” in terms of this genre’s reception. His narrative oeuvre includes the following collections: Iverje (Wood Shavings, 1899), Novo iverje (New Wood Shavings, 1900) and Umorne priče (Tired Tales, 1909). Depending on the type of motif, his short stories have been read as follows: 1. stories about local people and events; 2. humorous stories about people at home and abroad; 3. stories about unusual, unbelievable „unreal” events; 4. stories of enchanting and yearning love; 5. lyrical cadenzas. His symbolic-grotesque-fantastic story Moć savjesti (The Power of Conscience) marked his entry into the world of narrative literature. In this story, the binary relationship between the theme and the motif is recognised in the gap between the world of wakefulness and the world of dreams, reality and fantasy, what is real and what is unreal, the actual life and the ideal life, the object and the subject. At the same time, however, Matoš is trying to unite these opposites. In his other short stories, unusual plots become an expression of a deep ontological crisis which engulfed the European culture and art during modernism. The maxim of modern art at the turn of the century is „the world is a text”: art is a subjective reconstruction of the world and therefore plots, with all their logical cause and effect relationships, are no longer important since they cannot express other spheres of consciousness. In his short stories, the bizarre plots were used by Matoš to join two worlds, the world of outward reality and the world of imagination, the empirical and the fantastic, the possible and the impossible.

Through A Glass, Darkly? Antonin Artaud Through an Existentialist Prism

Taking as its guide Jean Baudrillard's assertion that one's connection with (or to) Antonin Artaud is necessarily a personal one, this paper asserts that Artaud's ontological crisis can be processed through a secular application of Saint John of the Cross's “dark night of the soul.” In turn, the article posits that Artaud, together with Antoine Roquentin and William Blake, the protagonists in Jean-Paul Sartre's “Nausea,” and Jim Jarmusch's “Dead Man,” respectively, form three sides of an existential prism, refracting light into their constituent parts and providing some clarity into the dilemma faced by each.

An ontological crisis? A review of large felid conservation in India

The need for a solid knowledge base to inform conservation activity is now universally recognised. We critically scrutinised the scientific knowledge of large felids in India located in peer-reviewed research papers to assess the information available to make landscape-level management decisions that aid conservation, which is a stated goal of both the Indian government and the international community. We found two striking patterns: the biological sciences dominate in the published literature, and nearly all the research has been carried out in protected areas, though a substantial number of large felids also live outside protected areas. We argue that these patterns are not incidental, but the result of the dualistic ontology of science that uses processes of ‘purification’ and ‘translation’ to fit complex realities into disciplinary prerogatives organised around creating dichotomies (like nature–culture). In addition, since this body of scientific knowledge locates large felids in ‘pure’ biological landscapes, there is little or no insight from multi-use landscapes. These findings, we believe, highlight important knowledge gaps in our present research-based knowledge of large felids in India, which urgently need to be addressed if progress is to be made in conservation.

Obstinate essentialism: identity transformations amongst gay men living with HIV

This article explores the ways gay men living with HIV talk about their identities in relationship to ideas concerning essentialism in the broader context of biomedicalisation. Data were collected from 36 HIV-positive gay men between 2001 and 2005 from two studies. All interview material was initially collected and analysed using broadly speaking thematic analysis. Identity-oriented themes were then further explored with a critical lens examining resonances with essentialism. We detail three related themes: ‘the intersections of homosexuality, HIV and the biomedical’; ‘being HIV: ontological crisis and obstinate essentialism’; and ‘identity and treating HIV’. These outline the ways in which both HIV- and gay identities are often interwoven (utilising shared narratives and concepts), embraced and/or resisted. We discuss the concept of essentialism within the wider transformation, or the ‘normalisation’, of both male homosexuality and HIV and draw attention to the salience of biomedicalisation and concomitant biopower within accounts of gay men living with HIV.

The Observer's Tale: Dr. Weber's Narrative (and Metanarrative) Trajectory in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker

This article explores the role of narrative in human consciousness in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker. I argue that Dr. Weber uses narrative strategies to navigate the existential crisis he suffers and that he maps his personal crisis onto humanity itself, creating the sense of a species-level epistemological and ontological crisis that forces us to reconsider humanism, the subject, and the role of narrative in consciousness formation and maintenance.

In Search of the Maternal: Patrick Süskind's Perfume

Patrick Süskind's Perfume chronicles Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's life from its ominous beginnings underneath a fish booth near the Cimetière des Innocents to its grotesque end in the same location, a haunting locus of infernal stench in eighteenth-century Paris. It is a story of raw brutality, rare intensity, and magic reality in which the protagonist's precarious position between olfactory prowess and lack of body odor motivates a string of despicable murders. The article correlates the protagonist's ontological crisis with the theme of the absent mother and brings to bear the feminist discourse on birthing and the womb in the trajectory of his life. Focusing on Kristeva's concepts of the Symbolic and the Semiotic and her notion of the chora, the article links the circumstances of Grenouille's birth, his seven-year sojourn in the cave, and the climactic closing of the cannibalistic feast, thus presenting new perspectives on the central events in the text.

Mainlandization or Sinophone translocality? Challenges for Hong Kong SAR New Wave cinema

ABSTRACTThe seeming revival of Hong Kong cinema through Hong Kong-China co-productions catered increasingly to the China market allowing major Hong Kong creative talents to prosper and even influence industry conventions and infrastructure in China. However, Hong Kong below-the-line jobs are increasingly replaced by those from China, making such careers unsustainable. Such ‘mainlandized’ co-productions find the more liberal Sinophone communities of Hong Kong and South East Asia harder to penetrate. Mainlandization and Hollywoodization in all Sinophone markets threatens Hong Kong film with ontological crisis. In this context, the Special Administrative Region (SAR) New Wave and their new generation of post-1980s audience make us wonder if cultural articulations that go beyond vertically imagined colonial/national identity politics are still possible; whether sensitive portrayals of inter-local Sinophone dialogues, the kind of creole translocality from below that has characterized much Hong Kong film productions are still viable, without giving up a decent China market.

Sobre o ethos na educação: dialogando com Kohlberg, Habermas e Boaventura de Sousa Santos

O momento civilizatório actual define-se como de crise epistêmica, antropológica, ontológica e ética. Ratificando o espaço educacional como locus privilegiado de constituição de subjetividades, o acento deste estudo recai sobre as concepções de Kohlberg, Habermas e Boaventura de Sousa Santos. As articulações entre filosofia, sociologia e educação iluminam a escola como território de construção subjetiva pela via da interdisciplinaridade. Habermas, em diálogo com a teoria kohlberguiana do julgamento moral, questiona o tecnicismo ao retomar uma ética iluminista cosmopolita emancipatória. Baseando-se na consideração da actualidade como momento de transição paradigmática, Santos posiciona-se contra as perspectivas iluministas antropológica, epistêmica e ética, propondo cartografias da experiência subjectiva que visem à emancipação por um ethos que se norteie pelo senso comum solidário. A discussão entre os autores dar-se-á considerando as relações entre ética e subjectividade no campo da educação, privilegiando os lugares do ensino-aprendizagem e do educador na instituição escolar.

Retro-Victorianism and the simulacrum of art in Will Self's Dorian: An imitation

This essay aims at exploring Will Self’s novel Dorian: An Imitation (2002) as a postmodernist revision of Oscar Wilde’s celebrated The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Exceptional for ones, immoral and shameful for others, Dorian: An Imitation fosters an intertextual relation with the late-Victorian hypotext whereby both texts are transformed out of a refractory process. Like its predecessor, Self’s novel is primarily interested in aesthetic issues. In this light, my main concern consists in analysing the artistic discourses that Dorian: An Imitation reflects and deflects in the era of simulation. Likewise, I examine how the novel delves into the problematic relationship between “reality” and “fiction”, original and simulacra. At the turn of the millennium, when virtual reality/ies are generated by computers, literature has a challenge which, in my view, Self’s novel deals with. Thus, from the theories of simulation proposed by Jean Baudrillard and, to a lesser extent, Gilles Deleuze, my essay confronts Dorian as a valuable text: it adapts the discourse of new technologies to literary language; it goes into the postmodernist ontological crisis; and, finally, it opens up the debate of aesthetic interaction between the canon and new literatures.

Consequences of the crisis: New concepts

The crisis that started in 2008 began with the malfunctioning of the financial mechanisms, i.e. as a financial crisis; it quickly became an economic crisis and is now threatening to become an energetic crisis and, lately, a crisis of agricultural products, announcing at the same time the crisis of a development model and an ontological crisis. It engages the questioning of certain conceptualizations and orientations. If one wonders about the new concepts employed by the foreseen “ontological crisis”, then one may answer, with powerful arguments, that there are concepts such as: “cultural turn”, “transdifference”, “complexity”, “risk” and “vulnerability”. These concepts are assumed in order to understand the world we are living in. If we ask ourselves about the changes in orientation brought by the crisis, then the answer is that this crisis forces us to review the diagnoses given to the current society and to accept that we have entered the “uncertain society”. The paper is based on the speech delivered b...

Steps to a Semiotics of Being

The following points, which represent a path to a semiotics of being, are pertinent to various sub-fields at the conjunction of semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics) and semiotics of culture—semioethics and existential semiotics included. 1) Semiotics of being entails inquiry at all levels of biological organization, albeit, wherever there are individuals, with emphasis on the living qua individuals (integrated biological individualism). 2) An Umwelt is the public aspect (cf. the Innenwelt, the private aspect) of a phenomenal/experienced world that is organism-specific (rather than species-specific) and ultimately refers to an existential realm. 3) Existential universals at work on Earth include seeking out the edible, dwelling in a medium, holding a phenomenal world (possibly an Umwelt) and being endowed with life, and consequently being mortal. 4) Human Umwelten include speechless Umwelten, spoken Umwelten and alphabetic Umwelten. 5) An Uexkullian phenomenology—stating that semiotic states represent the general class to which all mental/cognitive states belong—can draw on the works of the phenomenologists David Abram and Ted Toadvine (The notion of semiotic states is treated in Tonnessen 2009a: 62–63. For an introduction to eco-phenomenology, see Brown and Toadvine (eds.) 2003). 6) A task for such a phenomenology is to portray the natural history of the phenomenal world. 7) An imperative task in our contemporary world of faltering biological diversity is that of Umwelt mapping, i.e. a mapping of ontological niches. 8) The ecological crisis is an ontological crisis with historical roots in humankind’s domestication of animals and plants, which can be taken as archetypical for our attempted planet-scale taming of the wild. 9) The process of globalization is expressed by correlated trends of depletion of semiotic diversity and semiotic diversification. 10) Semiotic economy is a field which task it is to map the human ontological niche insofar as its semiotic relations are of an economic nature. All ten points will be commented (explicitly or implicitly) in due time.