In the latter period of his work, Samuel Beckett began to devote much of his writing to exploring the nature of the voice and the gaze. Even those works that directly concerned silence and blindness implicitly thematized the voice and the gaze by embodying their absence. With later works, Beckett began to call into question the way in which these phenomena contributed to the constitution of subjects, modes of self-identification, and their relation to chosen objects of desire. In the 1950s and 1960s, Beckett produced dozens of short pieces of prose and theatrical works that wholly dispensed with traditional plot and character in favor of a series of experimental reductions, for example, to breath and light (Breath), to a disembodied voice (Company, Eh Joe, That Time, Cascando), or to a mouth illuminated by a point of light (Not I). Jacque Lacan, who would come to secure the place of the voice and the gaze in the philosophical canon, wrote and lectured on these concepts at the same time. If brought into dialogue, the work of each thinker—each highly nuanced and complex in its own right—can serve as a hermeneutic tool for better elucidating the function of the voice and the gaze and the role that they play in the formation of subjects. A great deal of critics have erroneously overlooked Lacan’s insistence that when he invokes these concepts he is not speaking about the phenomenal voice or the gaze of perception as such; similarly, Beckett’s work, though it directly thematizes their phenomenal aspects, treats these concepts in a thoroughly Lacanian manner.

While certain levels of fear and anxiety seem quite appropriate to the experience of birth, it is detrimental if they become overwhelming. This article strives to understand birth-related affects more thoroughly by asking which affects are commonly involved, and how they come about. Martin Heidegger provides the most developed phenomenology of affects available to us. A phenomenological perspective proves useful because its close description allows categorising affects into mundane ones like fears—evoked by specific entities and circumstances—and existential ones like anxiety. Anxiety concerns our existence in its entirety and brings us face to face with the fact that we are finite beings in a groundless existence. Giving birth means needing to negotiate existential affects in a mundane situation. The birthgiving woman is dependent on others to take her seriously in her experience of affective turmoil in which anxiety and wonder, fears and anticipatory anxiousness come together.

Madness has long been an object of fascination in the Western cultural, literary, medical, and philosophical consciousness, and rightfully so; the human mind is the incredibly powerful, profoundly dynamic lens through which we inevitably perceive reality, and when that lens is corrupted by a defect of health or experience, the results are astounding. Illnesses such as schizophrenia continue to confound scientists to this day, whereas the cause-and-effect designs of other disorders such as PTSD are easily understood.

In this paper, we examine similarities between Sigmund Freud’s tripartite theory of personality to foundational works across various religious and philosophical movements. First, conceptual similarities to the id, ego, and superego are illustrated through scriptural verses and commentators of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Next, elements of the tripartite theory in the Eastern religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism are explored. Finally, this Freudian theory is viewed in relationship to various philosophical works from Ancient Greece to modern day. We suggest these earlier tripartite approaches emanating from diverse religious and philosophical movements emerge as a broader universal understanding of man from which Freud could have profited in developing one of his most seminal theories.

This paper considers Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, published in 1897, as a window into techno-scientific and sociocultural developments of the fin-de-siècle era, ranging from blood transfusion and virology up to communication technology and brain research, with a particular focus on the birth of psychoanalysis. Stoker’s literary classic heralds a new style of scientific thinking, foreshadowing important aspects of post-1900 culture. Dracula reflects a number of scientific events which surfaced in the 1890s and evolved into major research areas that are still relevant today. Rather than seeing science and literature as separate realms, Stoker’s masterpiece encourages us to address the ways in which techno-scientific and psycho-cultural developments mutually challenge and mirror one another, so that we may use his novel to deepen our understanding of emerging research practices and vice versa. Psychoanalysis plays a double role in this. It is the research field whose genealogical constellation is being studied, but at the same time (Lacanian) psychoanalysis guides my reading strategy. Dracula, the infectious, undead Vampire has become an archetypal cinematic icon and has attracted the attention of numerous scholars. The vampire complex built on various folkloristic and literary sources and culminated in two famous nineteenth-century literary publications: the story The Vampyre by John Polidori (1819) and Stoker’s version. Most of the more than 200 vampire movies released since Nosferatu (1922) are based on the latter. Rather than focus on the archetypal cinematic image of the Vampire, I discuss the various scientific ideas and instruments employed by Dracula’s antagonists to overcome the threat to civilisation he represents.

This is the first of five papers celebrating the psychological complexity of nineteenth century Russian novels authored by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, and Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev. Using biography, letters, narratives, and literary criticism, the life and writings of each author will be reviewed as they contribute to the understanding of the human mind and the apperception of the human condition. More subtly than the case study, more fully than the clinical anecdote, more profoundly than the apt example, these novels animate sterile, empirical findings and add dimension to the flatness all too prevalent among psychological description. Herein, Pushkin’s tempestuous upbringing, cavalier belligerence, and eccentric oddities show that the Russian author, as much as his work, sustains and rewards close psychological study.

Little attention has been paid to some aspects of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s intellectual activity compared with others. His affairs as a diplomat, his contribution to music, and his affection for botany are only three of them. This article shows their connections with forms of expression in which words are replaced by other kinds of graphic representation, such as ideographic signs for their evocation and numbers for their efficiency and simplicity. These contributions were collected in his first and last intellectual projects: Project for Musical Notation (1742), a young man’s idealistic challenge presented before Paris Académie des Sciences–and rejected by them; and Characters of Botany (1776-1778), a private senescence enterprise.

The Beats perceived the ideals of corporate capitalism to be corrupting and destructive annihilating their individuality and freedom of choice. According to them, capitalism was as much of a dictatorship as communism. The Beats strived to introduce spirituality as an alternative to the materialism propagated by capitalism. They also believed that this system was so irrational that it led to wars and the invention and use of the nuclear bomb. They were discontented with American capitalism because it tried to socio-politically control the citizens. They claimed to have rejected or at least escaped capitalism which is debatable and the paper shows that in some cases they did not manage to do that.

Literary criticism of Shakespeare’s Othello since the early 20th century leaves us with various complaints that Shakespeare fails to achieve poetic justice therein, or that this work leaves us, in the end, with a moral enigma—despite what seems to be Shakespeare’s intent to represent a plot and characters having moral probity and, thereby, to foster our moral edification through the tragedy that unfolds. Here a number of interpretive views concerning the morality proper to Othello are reviewed. Thereafter, it is proposed that Heidegger’s thought about the relation of appearance, semblance, and reality enables a novel interpretation of the moral significance of this tragedy, thereby to resolve the question of moral enigma.

This paper looks at authoritarianism as an expression of nihilism. In spite of his rigorous critique of Platonism, I suggest that Nietzsche shares with Plato an authoritarian vision that is rooted in the cyclical experience of time. The temporality of the eternal return unveils a vista of cosmic nihilism that cannot possibly be endured. In the absence of metaphysical foundations, the vital will to power is assigned an impossible task – to create meaning from nothing. I suggest that when confronted with the horror of the ungrounded void, the self-overcoming of nihilism reverts to self-annihilation. The declaration that God is dead becomes the belief that death is God. I trace Nietzsche’s cosmic nihilism back to Plato’s myths and the poetic vision of Sophocles and Aeschylus. I argue that Nietzsche’s overcoming of nihilism is itself nihilistic. However, this does not mean that Nietzsche’s project is as a complete failure. On the contrary, I suggest that Nietzsche’s deepest insight is that the good life does not consist of the pursuit of truth, but the alleviation of suffering.

In June 1914, Franz Kafka found himself overwhelmed by his life. Struggling personally, professionally, and artistically he sat one night to compose a story in his diary of a man confronted by the Divine, In this story, never published outside of his diary, Kafka sought to measure the distance between God and the individual in a post-traditional world. The result was the story of an aborted mystical experence in which Kafka defined the post-traditional existential experience in terms of failure. In so doing, Kafka also defined the post-modern existential condition in terms of the overwhelming distance the individual feels from God.

Luce Irigaray's concept of the "sensible transcendental" is a term that paradoxically fuses mind with body while, at the same time, maintaining the tension of adjacent but separate concepts, thereby providing a fruitful locus for changes to the symbolic order. It provides this locus by challenging the monolithic philosophical discourses of the "Same" which, according to Irigaray, have dominated western civilization since Plato. As such, the sensible transcendental refuses the logic that demands the opposed hierarchal dichotomies between time and space, form and matter, mind and body, self and other, and man and woman, which currently organize western civilization's discursive foundations. Instead, it provides a useful means for helping women to feel at home in their bodies, and it signifies the implementation of an ethical praxis based on the acknowledgment of sexual difference. Such a praxis demands philosophical, theological, juridical, and scientific accountability for systemic sexism and, in its acknowledgment and validation of the alterity of sexual difference, it respects life in its various forms and its vital relationship with biological and physical environments.

Is there a significant difference between Plato's texts and what is known as 'Platonism', that is, the philosophical tradition that claims Plato as its progenitor? Focusing on the Symposium, an attempt is made here to show that, far from merely fitting neatly into the categories of Platonism—with its neat distinction between the super-sensible and the sensible—Plato's own text is a complex, tension-filled terrain of countervailing forces. In the Symposium this tension obtains between the perceptive insights, on the one hand, into the nature of love and beauty, as well as the bond between them, and the metaphysical leap, on the other hand, from the experiential world to a supposedly accessible, but by definition super-sensible, experience-transcending realm. It is argued that, instead of being content with the philosophical illumination of the ambivalent human condition—something consummately achieved by mytho-poetic and quasi-phenomenohgical means—Plato turns to a putatively attainable, transcendent source of metaphysical reassurance which, moreover, displays all the trappings of an ideological construct. This is demonstrated by mapping Plato's lover's vision of 'absolute beauty' on to what Jacques Lacan has characterized as the unconscious structural quasi-condition of all religious and ideological illusion.

Contemporary Analytic Philosophy finds itself within a historical context, answering questions that have been handed to it by earlier philosophers. Specifically contemporary Analytic Philosophy finds itself responding to the Idealists of the nineteenth century in the hope of justifying the "new science" that seems to give us so many practical benefits. In doing this, questions arise as to how contemporary Analytic Philosophy will answer the problems that Idealists struggled with. In thefollowing, a brief overview of the Idealist enterprise will be contrasted with two contemporary Analytic Philosophers, namely Rudolf Carnap and W.V. Quine, in order to understand how the latter two deal with the philosophical problems handed to them by their tradition. Specifically, the question of universals and their relation to the absolute, and the assumption behind this concerning intuition are going to be investigated. This article will argue that the Idealist tradition raised important questions that Carnap and Quine were not able to answer. It will critique Carnap and Quine as failing to find the universal required for thought and propose an alternative pathway to finding the solution.

This article demonstrates that Hegel and Rushdie are contemporaries, and that the Phenomenology of Spirit and Midnight's Children are each others counterpart—philosophical and literary, respectively. It shows that the narrative structures of the Phenomenology of Spirit and Midnight's Children are identical, and both texts culminate in the remembrance of their narrative journeys. It argues that authenticity is constituted by the inauthentic. Recognizing that both texts remain open to the future, this article concludes by urging that India is now the land of the future and that Midnight's Children is the continuation of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Ernesto Grassts rhetorical theory proves helpful in illuminating William Faulkner's conception of humanity's dependence upon language. For both Grassi and Faulkner, language—the fundamental human art—serves metonymically, pointing toward humanity's need for other forms of artifice. Through the use of artificial means, the species is able not merely to survive, but to flourish, to prevail Characters in Faulkner's novels, such as Quentin Compson and Darl Bundren, who seek to transcend human verbalityI conventionality manifest forms of psychic disintegration. Like Faulkner, Grassi considers the attempt to escape artiflce as an act of insanity. Contrariwise, Grassi uses the term folly to refer to the willing recognition of the need to accept theforms of human artifice that allow the species to thrive.