London Consortium, Humanities and Cultural Studies

Approaches to the analytic-continental divide: Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with Ryle

by Andreas Vrahimis

Review of The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy: Britishness and the Spectre of Europe (T. L. Akehurst)

by Andreas Vrahimis

Review of Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy (Reynolds, J. & Chase, J.)

by Andreas Vrahimis

Kul-Touring and the Exoticisation of the Familiar: On Otherness and Alternation

by Elia Ntaousani

Paper submitted for the 'Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners' Conference of the Diversity and Recognition Project, Inter-Disciplinary.Net (Mansfield College, Oxford, 2011)

For the first time in history and across much of the world, as an article in The Economist points out, to be foreign... more For the first time in history and across much of the world, as an article in The Economist points out, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition: ‘The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity – the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.’ Except that on the one hand, according to the philosopher Chul-Han, globalising means not merely that Here is linked with There; more likely, a global Here is produced, while There is being constantly moved and removed – and so is accordingly the figure of the Foreigner. On the other, the contemporary human turns into something more than a nomad: a touristic figure that experiences culture (Kultur in German) by travelling the terrestrial and cybernetic space with her home virtually or pragmatically ‘on tour’.
This paper seeks to explore not only the slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, but also the conceptual shift from identity as continuity of a single dramatis persona to its instantaneous alterations, if not to the interrelationships between a particular space-time and the Self. ‘Depending on who is looking, the exotic is the other or it is me,’ writes inter alia Minh-ha in her effort to investigate travelling as the par excellence process of othering within this era of ‘identity crisis’. In fact, the Other constitutes not an off-shore figure anymore but part of our new larger family, global from scratch; she lingers in its core, whilst exoticising familiar events. By drawing on Bourriaud’s discourse of Alter-modernity, this paper wishes then to instead introduce the Alter as difference that is neither intrinsic nor distant but rather celebrates the alternative as such.

Æstetisk modkultur: om visse radikale aspekter af samtidskunsten i et historisk perspektiv

by Kasper Opstrup Frederiksen

Russell’s critique of Bergson and the divide between ‘Analytic’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy

by Andreas Vrahimis

published in the Balkan Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Special Issue dedicated to ‘The Dialogue between Continental and Analytic Philosophy’), pp. 123-134, 2011.

In 1911, Bergson visited Britain for a number of lectures which led to his increasing popularity. Russell personally... more In 1911, Bergson visited Britain for a number of lectures which led to his increasing popularity. Russell personally encountered Bergson during his lecture at University College London on 28 October, and on 30 October Bergson attended one of Russell’s lectures. Russell went on to write a number of critical articles on Bergson, contributing to the hundreds of publications on Bergson which ensued following these lectures.
Russell’s critical writings have been seen as part of a history of controversies between so-called ‘Continental’ and ‘Analytic’ philosophers in the twentieth century. Yet Russell’s engagement with Bergson’s thought comes as a response to a particular British form of Bergsonism and is involved with the wider phenomenon of the British import of Bergsonism (by figures connected in different ways to Russell, such as Hulme, Wildon Carr or Eliot). Though this may challenge the view of Russell and Bergson as enacting an early version of the ‘Analytic’-‘Continental’ divide, there are however some particular characterisations of Bergson by Russell which contribute to the subsequent formation of the ‘rotten scene’ (Glendinning 2006: 69) of the divide in the second half of the twentieth century.

NONSENSE AND ABSURDITY: CARNAP‟ S USE OF HUSSERL‟ S THEORY OF MEANING

by Andreas Vrahimis

Critical Theory of Gender

by Elia Ntaousani

Paper given at the 8th European Social Science History Conference (Ghent, Belgium - April 2010)

„In the late twentieth century, after all, we are ourselves literally embodied writing technologies. That is part of... more „In the late twentieth century, after all, we are ourselves literally embodied writing technologies. That is part of the implosion of gender in sex and language, in biology and syntax, enabled by Western technoscience.“
Donna J. Haraway (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, p. 128.

These thoughts were the stimulus for this paper’s effort to treat the notions of ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘identity’ through the controversial points of view, emerged among the feminist writings of the 1970s, the historians and psychoanalysts of the 1980s.While post-stucturalists like J. Butler are passing from gender denaturalization to the undoing of gender, brain scientists speak about a potential underestimation of innate biology at its equation with the anatomical sex; hormones and neurochemicals, constantly changing the brain state, not taken into account. ‘Gender’ constitutes in this sense the key term that is being posed and reposed, thought and rethought, done and undone. My paper will be thus divided into three parts that shall refer to a critical vision of gender categories in various discursive domains.
First part will treat the intrinsic introduction of gender as notion during the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to contest the naturalisation of the bipartite sex difference of men from women, male from female, in multiple arenas of struggle. Despite having passed from the ‘biological’ (sexual difference) to the ‘ontological determinism’ (desire) through the ‘social constructivism’ (power), the notion of “gender” remains trapped within the oppressive Western binarism culture/nature, and therefore the second part will explore the new ways of thinking gender that emerge in the 1990s towards a deconstruction or denaturalisation of this notion; that is, gender as representation and as subjective identity. Although Butler’s theory of performativity did succeed not only to disqualify normative analytical categories leading to univocity, such as sex or nature, but also to release both genders and their social frame of reference from any determinism, the third part will not only show in what extent this very notion of gender (as doing) is nowadays again in crisis but also inquire the possible explanations for the impoverishment of gender and therefore for the necessity of its undoing. A mysterious elsewhere will emerge as a sort of agency that motivates us and establishes our sexuality, whose full meaning we ignore. The innate neurochemical biology of Brizendine will thus broaden up the cognitive fields and open new perspectives of rethinking gender, the mysterious elsewhere and -why not?- biology itself.

Mute Movement: Score and Silence in the work of Maya Deren

by Elinor Cleghorn

Paper given at Moves, Manchester 2008

Abstract Shadows: An Aesthetics of the General

by Cécile Guédon

A Minor Cinema: Moving Images on the Internet

by Eu Jin Chua

Published in 'The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader', eds. Stella Brennan and Su Ballard. Auckland, New Zealand: Aotearoa Digital Arts Trust and Clouds Publishing, 2008.

http://www.clouds.co.nz/the-aotearoa-digital-arts-reader/

Ecological Aesthetics--With or Without the Sublime?

by Eu Jin Chua

Published in _The Sublime Now_, eds. Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009)

Review of 'Ugly Feelings' by Sianne Ngai

by Eu Jin Chua

Published in 'The Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature' 6.2 (2007)

Untethering Landscape

by Eu Jin Chua

Published in 'Figuring Landscapes: Artists’ Moving Image from Australia and the UK'.  Eds. Catherine Elwes, Eu Jin Chua, and Steven Ball.  London: International Centre for Fine Arts Research and Camberwell College of Arts, 2008, pp. 99-102. 

Laurie Anderson's Telepresence

by Eu Jin Chua

Published in 'Postmodern Culture' 16.2 (2006), Johns Hopkins University Press.  Abbreviated version in Polish translation published as "Ucieczka Hologramu" in 'Kultura Popularna' 4.10 (2004)

Figuring Landscapes: Artists' Moving Image from Australia and the UK

by Eu Jin Chua

Co-edited with Catherine Elwes and Steven Ball. Published by Catherine Elwes, the International Centre for Fine Arts Research, and Camberwell College of Arts, 2008.