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Globalization and the Posthuman argues that by globalizing posthumanism through biotechnology, particularly through the invasive interface of humans and machines, we may well interfere with and even undermine the innate quality of human psycho-physiology and the experience of the internal observer, the non-socially constructed self or pure consciousness. Furthermore, many features of globalization in-and-of itself—such as the fall of public man, the exterritorialization of capital, the loss of an impersonal public world to localized communities based on emotively shared interests—combined with the posthuman expansion of biotechnology will diminish our natural capacity to experience the s...
Haney demonstrates that the debates in theory surrounding the questions of identity, truth, and language, which have so far eluded the mind or reason, cannot be resolved without recourse to the structure of consciousness and intersubjectivity - an interaction mediated by language and resulting in mutual agreement. Chapters four to eight apply the notion of intersubjectivity to the reading of specific works."--Jacket.
Addressing a key issue related to human nature, this book argues that the first-person experience of pure consciousness may soon be under threat from posthuman biotechnology. In exploiting the mind's capacity for instrumental behavior, posthumanists seek to extend human experience by physically projecting the mind outward through the continuity of thought and the material world, as through telepresence and other forms of prosthetic enhancements. Posthumanism envisions a biology/machine symbiosis that will promote this extension, arguably at the expense of the natural tendency of the mind to move toward pure consciousness. As each chapter of this book contends, by forcibly overextending and t...
The dialectic of light and darkness studied in this collection of essays reveals itself as a primal factor of life as well as the essential element of the specifically human world. From its borderline position between physis and psyche, natural growth and techne, bios and ethos, it functions as the essential factor in all the sectors of life at large. We see its crucial role in all sectors of life while, prompted by man's creative imagination, it enhances and spurs his vital as well as societal and spiritual life. This rare collection contains studies by Thomas Ryba, Krystina Górniak-Kocikowska, Lois Oppenheim, Sydney Feshback, Eldon van Lieve, Sitansu Ray, Theodore Litman, Peter Morgan, Colette Michael, Christopher Lalonde, L. Findlay, Christopher Eykman, Beverly Schlack Randles, Jorge García-Gómez, William Haney, Sherilyn Abdoo, David Brottman, Alan Pratt, Hans Rudnick, George Scheper, Freema Gottlieb, Marlies Kronegger.
Different symbolic traditions have different ways of describing the shift of awareness toward sacred events. While not conforming to familiar states of phenomenality, this shift of awareness corresponds to Turner's liminal phase, Artaud's metaphysical embodiment, Grotowski's “translumination,” Brook's “holy theater,” and Barba's “transcendent” theater—all of which are linked to the Advaitan taste of a void of conceptions. This book argues that, by allowing to come what Derrida calls the unsayable, the theater of Tom Stoppard, David Henry Hwang, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Derek Walcott and Girish Karnad induces characters and spectators to deconstruct habitual patterns of per...
This interdisciplinary collection of critical articles seeks to reassess the concept of hybridity and its relevance to post-colonial theory and literature. The challenging articles written by internationally acclaimed scholars discuss the usefulness of the term in relation to such questions as citizenship, whiteness studies and transnational identity politics. In addition to developing theories of hybridity, the articles in this volume deal with the role of hybridity in a variety of literary and cultural phenomena in geographical settings ranging from the Pacific to native North America. The collection pays particular attention to questions of hybridity, migrancy and diaspora.
The book raises questions about the underlying paradigms of contemporary learning and social thinking, including the nature of consciousness and the mind, the purpose and conduct of eduation, the role of science and scientific methodologies, the place of art and literature, or relationship to the environment, our concepts of spirituality, our attitudes to the past and also what we are doing to our own future.
In her Introduction, Tymieniecka states the core theme of the present book sharply: Is culture an excess of nature's prodigious expansiveness - an excess which might turn out to be dangerous for nature itself if it goes too far - or is culture a 'natural', congenial prolongation of nature-life? If the latter, then culture is assimilated into nature and thus would lose its claim to autonomy: its criteria would be superseded by those of nature alone. Of course, nature and culture may both still be seen as being absorbed by the inner powers of specifically human inwardness, on which view, human being, caught in its own transcendence, becomes separated radically in kind from the rest of existenc...
Time, Consciousness and Writing brings together a collection of critical reflections on Peter Malekin’s “model of the mind”, which he saw as a crucial yet often neglected aspect of critical theory in relation to theatre, literature and the arts. The volume begins with a selection of Peter Malekin’s own writings that lay out his critique of western culture, its overstated claims to universal competence and validity, and lays out an alternative view of consciousness that draws partly on Asian traditions and partly on underground traditions from the west. The essays that follow, commissioned for this volume, critically examine Malekin’s ideas, drawing out their implications in a variety of contexts including theatre, liturgical performance, poetry and literature. The book ends with an assessment of future prospects opened by this work.
The nature of life consists in a constructive becoming (see Analecta Husserliana vol. 70). Though caught up in its relatively stable, stationary intervals manifesting the steps of its accomplishments that our attention is fixed. In this selection of studies we proceed, in contrast, to envisage life in the Aristotelian perspective in which energia, forces, and dynamisms of life at work are at the fore. Startling questions emerge: `what distinction could be drawn between the prompting forces of life and its formation? Or, is this distinction a result of our transcendental faculties?' The answers to these questions reveal themselves, as Tymieniecka proposes, at the phenomenologically ontopoietic level of life's origination where transcendentality surges.