Ontology And Perversion

This book examines the philosophical and political relevance of perversion in the works of three key representatives of contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis: Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Lacan. Perversion is often understood simply in terms of cultural or sexual phenomena. By contrast, Boštjan Nedoh places perversion at the heart of philosophical, ontological and political issues in the works of Deleuze, Agamben and Lacan. He examines the relevance of their discussions of perversion for their respective critical ontological projects. By tracing the differences between these thinkers’ understanding of perversion, the book finally draws lines of delimitation between the vitalist and the structuralist or psychoanalytic philosophical positions in contemporary philosophy.

Richard C. Sha’s revealing study considers how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period. Through careful and imaginative readings of various scientific texts, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Longinus, and the works of such writers as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron, Sha explores the influence of contemporary aesthetics and biology on literary Romanticism. Revealing that ideas of sexuality during the Romantic era were much more fluid and undecided than they are often characterized in the existing scholarship, Sha’s innovative study complicates received claims concerning the shift from perversity to perversion in the nineteenth century. He observes that the questions of perversity—or purposelessness—became simultaneously critical in Kantian aesthetics, biological functionalism, and Romantic ideas of private and public sexuality. The Romantics, then, sought to reconceptualize sexual pleasure as deriving from mutuality rather than from the biological purpose of reproduction. At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, Perverse Romanticism makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.

Touching on the fields of philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies, and queer theory, Pervert-Schizoid-Woman critiques the organization of Western economy, language, and desire. Author Michael Williams seeks to promote alternative frameworks for a posthumanist theory and practice of perverse selfhood and sociality. In this study, he identifies the capitalist economic system as structured by scarcity and supply/demand dynamics, discerning the paradoxical accumulation of debt as the essence of the assumed scarcity in the financial system. He also uncovers the profound isomorphism between the economics of scarcity and the castration and lack at the center of the psychoanalytic interpretation of gender, sexuality, and desire, concluding that the essential negativity in the scarcity of capitalism, the absence in the structure of language, and the castration in the network of desire are the sources of the dysfunctions in Western systems of finance, expression, and gender and sexuality.

This book takes up the question of Christian queer theology and ethics through the contested lens of "redemption." Starting from the root verb "to deem," the authors argue that queer lives and struggles can illuminate and re-value the richness of embodied experience that is implied in Christian incarnational theology and ethics. Offering a set of virtues gleaned from contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and asexual (LGBTIQA) lives and communities, this book introduces a new framework of ethical reasoning. Battered and wrongly condemned by life-denying theologies of redemption and dessicating ethics of virtue, this book asserts that the resilience, creativity, and epistemology manifesting in queer lives and communities are essential to a more generous and liberative Christian theology. In this book, queer "virtues" not only reveal and re-value queer soul but expose covert viciousness in the traditional (i.e., inherently colonial and racist, and thus ungodly) "family values" of dominant Christian ethics and theology. It argues that such re-imagining has redemptive potential for Christian life writ large, including the redemption of God. This book will be a key resource for scholars of queer theology and ethics as well as queer theory, gender and race studies, religious studies, and theology more generally.

We imagine posthumans as humans made superhumanly intelligent or resilient by future advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. Many argue that these enhanced people might live better lives; others fear that tinkering with our nature will undermine our sense of our own humanity. Whoever is right, it is assumed that our technological successor will be an upgraded or degraded version of us: Human 2.0. Posthuman Life argues that the enhancement debate projects a human face onto an empty screen. We do not know what will happen and, not being posthuman, cannot anticipate how posthumans will assess the world. If a posthuman future will not necessarily be informed by our kind of subjectivity or morality the limits of our current knowledge must inform any ethical or political assessment of that future. Posthuman Life develops a critical metaphysics of posthuman succession and argues that only a truly speculative posthumanism can support an ethics that meets the challenge of the transformative potential of technology.

Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and queer theory, Grosz shows how feminism and cultural analysis have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal traces of their production as bodies. She investigates the work of Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingi, considering their work by examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. Grosz moves toward a radical consideration of bodies and their relationship to transgression and perversity.

Taxidermy and the Gothic: The Horror of Still Life is the first extended study of the Gothic’s collusion with taxidermy. It tells the story of the emergence in the long nineteenth century of the twin golden ages of the Gothic genre and the practice of taxidermy, and their shared rhetorical and narratological strategies, anxieties, and sensibilities. It follows the thread into twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture, including recent horror film, fiction, television, and visual arts to argue that the Gothic and taxidermy are two discursive bodies, stuffed and stitched together. Moving beyond the well-worn path that treats taxidermy as a sentimental art or art of mourning, this book takes readers down a new dark trail, finding an overlooked but rich tradition in the Gothic that aligns it with the affective and corporeal work of horror and the unsettling aesthetics, experiences, and pleasures that come with it. Over the course of four chapters, it argues that in addition to entwined origins, taxidermy’s uncanny appearance in Gothic and horror texts is a driving force in generating fear. For taxidermy embodies the phenomenological horror of stuckness, of being there. In sum, taxidermy’s imbrication with the Gothic is more than skin deep: these are rich discourses stuffed by affinities for corporeal transgressions, the uncanny, and the counterfeit.

Bringing Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan into dialogue, James Penney examines the overlooked similarities between Genet's literary oeuvre and Lacanian psychoanalysis, uncovering in particular their shared ontology of fragility and incompletion. This book exposes the two thinkers' joint and unwavering ontological conviction that the representations that make up the world of appearances are inherently enigmatic: inscrutable, not only on the level of their problematic link to knowledge and meaning, but also, more fundamentally, as concerns the reliability of their existence. According to Genet and Lacan, the signification of words and images will forever remain unfulfilled, just like the whole of reality, as if prematurely removed from the oven, under-baked. Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion reveals how, in the same manner as Lacan's psychoanalytic act, Genet's acts of poetry further seek to expose the fragile prop that holds our reality together, baring the fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates. Moving away from scholarship that considers Genet's plays, novels, sexuality and politics in isolation, Penney explores the whole span of Genet's work, from his early novels to the posthumously-published Prisoner of Love and, combining this with psychoanalysis, opens up new avenues for thinking about Genet, Lacan and our wanting being.