Frida Beckman (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748642618
- eISBN:
- 9780748671755
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748642618.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
For Deleuze, sexuality is a force that can capture as well as liberate life. Its flows tend to be repressed and contained in specific forms while at the same time they retain revolutionary potential. ...
More
For Deleuze, sexuality is a force that can capture as well as liberate life. Its flows tend to be repressed and contained in specific forms while at the same time they retain revolutionary potential. There is immense power in the thousand sexes of desiring-machines, and sexuality is seen as a source of becoming. This book gathers prominent Deleuze scholars to explore the restricting and liberating forces of sexuality in relation to a spread of central themes in Deleuze's philosophy, including politics, psychoanalysis and friendship as well as specific topics such as the body-machine, disability, feminism and erotics.Less
For Deleuze, sexuality is a force that can capture as well as liberate life. Its flows tend to be repressed and contained in specific forms while at the same time they retain revolutionary potential. There is immense power in the thousand sexes of desiring-machines, and sexuality is seen as a source of becoming. This book gathers prominent Deleuze scholars to explore the restricting and liberating forces of sexuality in relation to a spread of central themes in Deleuze's philosophy, including politics, psychoanalysis and friendship as well as specific topics such as the body-machine, disability, feminism and erotics.
Lauren Shohet
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199295890
- eISBN:
- 9780191594311
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199295890.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter shows that mid‐ and late‐ seventeenth‐century booksellers' catalogues designate public theatrical masques, Interregnum closet pieces, and Restoration operas as “masques.” Masques were ...
More
This chapter shows that mid‐ and late‐ seventeenth‐century booksellers' catalogues designate public theatrical masques, Interregnum closet pieces, and Restoration operas as “masques.” Masques were more than nonce works, instead retaining commercial appeal long past their performance dates. This chapter cross‐reads masques from different venues, contained within plays, intertextually mentioned in pageants, parodied in ballads, and recorded in gossip. Masques' habitual intertextual allusiveness contributes to the genre's self‐conscious explorations of how drama constitutes authority, their canniness contradicting New Historicist symptomatic readings. Case studies include two intertextually related masques of 1617–18 (White's Cupid's Banishment, produced by a London girls' school, and Jonson's courtly Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue); a cluster of 1630s masques of temperance (Milton's Ludlow masque Comus, Davenant's courtly Luminalia, Thomas Nabbes's public theatrical masque Microcosmus, Thomas Heywood's Lord Mayor's show Porta Pietatis); and Shirley's spectacular 1634 Triumph of Peace.Less
This chapter shows that mid‐ and late‐ seventeenth‐century booksellers' catalogues designate public theatrical masques, Interregnum closet pieces, and Restoration operas as “masques.” Masques were more than nonce works, instead retaining commercial appeal long past their performance dates. This chapter cross‐reads masques from different venues, contained within plays, intertextually mentioned in pageants, parodied in ballads, and recorded in gossip. Masques' habitual intertextual allusiveness contributes to the genre's self‐conscious explorations of how drama constitutes authority, their canniness contradicting New Historicist symptomatic readings. Case studies include two intertextually related masques of 1617–18 (White's Cupid's Banishment, produced by a London girls' school, and Jonson's courtly Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue); a cluster of 1630s masques of temperance (Milton's Ludlow masque Comus, Davenant's courtly Luminalia, Thomas Nabbes's public theatrical masque Microcosmus, Thomas Heywood's Lord Mayor's show Porta Pietatis); and Shirley's spectacular 1634 Triumph of Peace.
James A. Steintrager
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231151580
- eISBN:
- 9780231540872
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231151580.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during ...
More
What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous—and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law unto itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also analyzes the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.Less
What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous—and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law unto itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also analyzes the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.
Frida Beckman
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748645923
- eISBN:
- 9780748689170
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748645923.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, this book identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure while also ...
More
Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, this book identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure while also searching for the possibility of claiming sexual pleasure as a constructive and politically enabling notion today. In the face of the way in which Deleuze’s theory of desire builds on a rejection of the usefulness of pleasure, this book works to construct a Deleuzian theory of sexuality that is inclusive of pleasure. Intervening into contemporary fields of research including posthumanist-, disability-, animal-, and feminist studies as well as into current critiques of capitalism and consumerism, Between Desire and Pleasure works to contribute to cultural, conceptual, and political debates about sexuality.Less
Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, this book identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure while also searching for the possibility of claiming sexual pleasure as a constructive and politically enabling notion today. In the face of the way in which Deleuze’s theory of desire builds on a rejection of the usefulness of pleasure, this book works to construct a Deleuzian theory of sexuality that is inclusive of pleasure. Intervening into contemporary fields of research including posthumanist-, disability-, animal-, and feminist studies as well as into current critiques of capitalism and consumerism, Between Desire and Pleasure works to contribute to cultural, conceptual, and political debates about sexuality.
Aaron Schuster
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262528597
- eISBN:
- 9780262334150
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262528597.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is ...
More
Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two formidable figures of post-war French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze’s work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In this book Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire—the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within—“the trouble with pleasure.” Along the way, Schuster offers his own conceptual analyses and examples. In the “Critique of Pure Complaint” he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud’s theory of neurosis to Spinoza’s intellectual complaint of God and the Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate a theory of love as “mutually compatible symptoms”; an original philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of the 1920s “literature of the death drive,” including Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.Less
Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two formidable figures of post-war French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze’s work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In this book Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire—the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within—“the trouble with pleasure.” Along the way, Schuster offers his own conceptual analyses and examples. In the “Critique of Pure Complaint” he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud’s theory of neurosis to Spinoza’s intellectual complaint of God and the Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate a theory of love as “mutually compatible symptoms”; an original philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of the 1920s “literature of the death drive,” including Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.
Terence Irwin
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195086454
- eISBN:
- 9780199833306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195086457.003.0019
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy
This chapter focuses on how some crucial doctrines of the Republic are then developed in the Philebus. Firstly, the problem of whether pleasure or intelligence is the good in a more articulated way ...
More
This chapter focuses on how some crucial doctrines of the Republic are then developed in the Philebus. Firstly, the problem of whether pleasure or intelligence is the good in a more articulated way than the one of the Republic is treated. Secondly, the different types of knowledge and their role in the good life are examined. Thirdly, more generally, it is discussed how the Philebus presents a more exhaustive and precise account of what are, in Plato’s view, intelligence, pleasure, and good. Finally, it is underlined how the Philebus is important for understanding the connection between Plato’s and Aristotle’s ethics.Less
This chapter focuses on how some crucial doctrines of the Republic are then developed in the Philebus. Firstly, the problem of whether pleasure or intelligence is the good in a more articulated way than the one of the Republic is treated. Secondly, the different types of knowledge and their role in the good life are examined. Thirdly, more generally, it is discussed how the Philebus presents a more exhaustive and precise account of what are, in Plato’s view, intelligence, pleasure, and good. Finally, it is underlined how the Philebus is important for understanding the connection between Plato’s and Aristotle’s ethics.
Terence Irwin
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195086454
- eISBN:
- 9780199833306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195086457.003.0020
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy
The last chapter analyses how Plato’s ethical views are developed in the later dialogues (the Philebus, the Statesman, and the Laws). In the last dialogue Plato tries to harmonise the different ...
More
The last chapter analyses how Plato’s ethical views are developed in the later dialogues (the Philebus, the Statesman, and the Laws). In the last dialogue Plato tries to harmonise the different virtues. The relations between pleasure, happiness, and desire are analysed. Finally, the role played by the cardinal virtues in the later dialogues is examined, in particular, a certain attention toward the condition of wisdom and how it is related to the other virtues.Less
The last chapter analyses how Plato’s ethical views are developed in the later dialogues (the Philebus, the Statesman, and the Laws). In the last dialogue Plato tries to harmonise the different virtues. The relations between pleasure, happiness, and desire are analysed. Finally, the role played by the cardinal virtues in the later dialogues is examined, in particular, a certain attention toward the condition of wisdom and how it is related to the other virtues.
Karolyn Steffens
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694266
- eISBN:
- 9781474412391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694266.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Foregrounding intersections between Ford and Freud, this chapter analyzes Ford’s Impressionism alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tracing the development of Ford’s Impressionism through ...
More
Foregrounding intersections between Ford and Freud, this chapter analyzes Ford’s Impressionism alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tracing the development of Ford’s Impressionism through episodes from No Enemy, ‘True Love and a GCM’, and Parade’s End, the compositional evolution that emerges from this comparison displays how Ford’s Impressionism becomes an aesthetic of duality, mirroring Tietjens who becomes the paradigmatic homo duplex in the trenches. Instead of merely representing the violence of war (Thanatos), these three texts illustrate how both Eros and Thanatos become constitutive of the trauma of the Great War for Ford. His Impressionism evolves into one that defines traumatized consciousness as interpenetrated by both Eros and Thanatos, an aesthetic that illuminates the frequently overlooked intersections between sexuality and violence in Freud’s theories of trauma.Less
Foregrounding intersections between Ford and Freud, this chapter analyzes Ford’s Impressionism alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tracing the development of Ford’s Impressionism through episodes from No Enemy, ‘True Love and a GCM’, and Parade’s End, the compositional evolution that emerges from this comparison displays how Ford’s Impressionism becomes an aesthetic of duality, mirroring Tietjens who becomes the paradigmatic homo duplex in the trenches. Instead of merely representing the violence of war (Thanatos), these three texts illustrate how both Eros and Thanatos become constitutive of the trauma of the Great War for Ford. His Impressionism evolves into one that defines traumatized consciousness as interpenetrated by both Eros and Thanatos, an aesthetic that illuminates the frequently overlooked intersections between sexuality and violence in Freud’s theories of trauma.
Terence Irwin
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195086454
- eISBN:
- 9780199833306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195086457.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy
The purpose of chapter 7 is to outline the role played by the Gorgias in the development of Plato’s ethical views. To start with, the characteristics and the peculiarities of rhetoric are evaluated. ...
More
The purpose of chapter 7 is to outline the role played by the Gorgias in the development of Plato’s ethical views. To start with, the characteristics and the peculiarities of rhetoric are evaluated. Then, it is presented how Socrates, although he attacks Callicles’ hedonism, maintains an instrumentalist conception according to which virtues are means for achieving happiness. In conclusion, Socrates’ adaptive doctrine of happiness, which appears to imply that happiness consists in the satisfaction of one’s desires, is discussed.Less
The purpose of chapter 7 is to outline the role played by the Gorgias in the development of Plato’s ethical views. To start with, the characteristics and the peculiarities of rhetoric are evaluated. Then, it is presented how Socrates, although he attacks Callicles’ hedonism, maintains an instrumentalist conception according to which virtues are means for achieving happiness. In conclusion, Socrates’ adaptive doctrine of happiness, which appears to imply that happiness consists in the satisfaction of one’s desires, is discussed.
Terence Irwin
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195086454
- eISBN:
- 9780199833306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195086457.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy
Chapter 8 contains a detailed discussion of the consequences that may be inferred by the doctrines discussed in the Gorgias. The position of the Gorgias recalls that of the Protagoras. Then, it is ...
More
Chapter 8 contains a detailed discussion of the consequences that may be inferred by the doctrines discussed in the Gorgias. The position of the Gorgias recalls that of the Protagoras. Then, it is claimed that, although the Gorgias tries to refute the earlier dialogue’s hedonist view, Plato nevertheless still holds that happiness is the state in which all desires are fulfilled. Consequently, virtues are considered valuable only because they are means to attain a further end. Finally, it may be suggested that the Gorgias makes a sort of transition from the early dialogues to the mature position of the Republic.Less
Chapter 8 contains a detailed discussion of the consequences that may be inferred by the doctrines discussed in the Gorgias. The position of the Gorgias recalls that of the Protagoras. Then, it is claimed that, although the Gorgias tries to refute the earlier dialogue’s hedonist view, Plato nevertheless still holds that happiness is the state in which all desires are fulfilled. Consequently, virtues are considered valuable only because they are means to attain a further end. Finally, it may be suggested that the Gorgias makes a sort of transition from the early dialogues to the mature position of the Republic.
John Franceschina
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199754298
- eISBN:
- 9780199949878
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199754298.003.0010
- Subject:
- Music, Dance, Popular
Hermes Pan stages dances for James Cagney in Never Steal Anything Small at Universal-International Pictures before starting work on Porgy and Bess for Samuel Goldwyn. He then moves on to television ...
More
Hermes Pan stages dances for James Cagney in Never Steal Anything Small at Universal-International Pictures before starting work on Porgy and Bess for Samuel Goldwyn. He then moves on to television where he wins an Emmy Award for his choreography for An Evening with Fred Astaire. He returns to Twentieth Century-Fox to choreograph The Blue Angel and Can-Can, the film that scandalized Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev during his visit to the United States. For Astaire, Pan staged the dance sequences in The Pleasure of His Company at Paramount and Another Evening with Fred Astaire and Astaire Time for television. For Ross Hunter, Pan choreographed a $4,000,000 production of Flower Drum Song created a spectacular dream ballet to the music of “Sunday.”Less
Hermes Pan stages dances for James Cagney in Never Steal Anything Small at Universal-International Pictures before starting work on Porgy and Bess for Samuel Goldwyn. He then moves on to television where he wins an Emmy Award for his choreography for An Evening with Fred Astaire. He returns to Twentieth Century-Fox to choreograph The Blue Angel and Can-Can, the film that scandalized Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev during his visit to the United States. For Astaire, Pan staged the dance sequences in The Pleasure of His Company at Paramount and Another Evening with Fred Astaire and Astaire Time for television. For Ross Hunter, Pan choreographed a $4,000,000 production of Flower Drum Song created a spectacular dream ballet to the music of “Sunday.”
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756877
- eISBN:
- 9780804768375
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756877.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
Excision in all of its forms is distributed on the African continent along two axes intersecting in Sudan: an east-west axis from Yemen to Senegal and a north-south axis from Egypt to Tanzania. ...
More
Excision in all of its forms is distributed on the African continent along two axes intersecting in Sudan: an east-west axis from Yemen to Senegal and a north-south axis from Egypt to Tanzania. Today, infibulation is still practiced in parts of Somalia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mali, and Chad, and Mali. Hence, “the sealed condition” arising from infibulation is evoked as a common practice, if not a rite of passage per se, by Somali women writers such as Saïda Hagi-Dirie Herzi. Infibulation is known as Sudanese circumcision in Egypt and pharaonic circumcision in other parts of Africa, particularly Sudan. Herzi's short story “Against the Pleasure Principle” (1992) conflates infibulation in the Horn of Africa, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Western obstetrics. It not only raises the issue of obstetrical complications, but also indirectly tackles female sexual pleasure. In her text, Herzi engages Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle ([1919] 1953).Less
Excision in all of its forms is distributed on the African continent along two axes intersecting in Sudan: an east-west axis from Yemen to Senegal and a north-south axis from Egypt to Tanzania. Today, infibulation is still practiced in parts of Somalia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mali, and Chad, and Mali. Hence, “the sealed condition” arising from infibulation is evoked as a common practice, if not a rite of passage per se, by Somali women writers such as Saïda Hagi-Dirie Herzi. Infibulation is known as Sudanese circumcision in Egypt and pharaonic circumcision in other parts of Africa, particularly Sudan. Herzi's short story “Against the Pleasure Principle” (1992) conflates infibulation in the Horn of Africa, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Western obstetrics. It not only raises the issue of obstetrical complications, but also indirectly tackles female sexual pleasure. In her text, Herzi engages Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle ([1919] 1953).
Geoffrey R. Stone
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199812042
- eISBN:
- 9780199315888
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812042.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Novels of the eighteenth century often treat sexuality in highly explicit terms, by the standards even of our own time, and certainly by Victorian standards. This chapter addresses the topic of ...
More
Novels of the eighteenth century often treat sexuality in highly explicit terms, by the standards even of our own time, and certainly by Victorian standards. This chapter addresses the topic of sexual explicitness, looking at the role of law in regulating artistic expression in our period. It argues that we tend today to think of a legal doctrine of obscenity as quite natural, regardless of whether we like the doctrine as it exists. However, the doctrine did not exist at all until the eighteenth century and did not have any real bite in English law until the publication of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in 1748. The chapter traces the origins of the obscenity doctrine in English law in order to show, among other things, that it was not a meaningful part of either English or American law until well after the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was enacted. Looking at the nonregulation of highly explicit literature by law informs us about our legal concepts, past and present.Less
Novels of the eighteenth century often treat sexuality in highly explicit terms, by the standards even of our own time, and certainly by Victorian standards. This chapter addresses the topic of sexual explicitness, looking at the role of law in regulating artistic expression in our period. It argues that we tend today to think of a legal doctrine of obscenity as quite natural, regardless of whether we like the doctrine as it exists. However, the doctrine did not exist at all until the eighteenth century and did not have any real bite in English law until the publication of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in 1748. The chapter traces the origins of the obscenity doctrine in English law in order to show, among other things, that it was not a meaningful part of either English or American law until well after the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was enacted. Looking at the nonregulation of highly explicit literature by law informs us about our legal concepts, past and present.
Eliza Cubitt
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526123503
- eISBN:
- 9781526141972
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526123503.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter places the leisure pursuits of female characters in Harkness’s fiction in a broader context of gendered cultural anxieties about working-class leisure activities in the late nineteenth ...
More
This chapter places the leisure pursuits of female characters in Harkness’s fiction in a broader context of gendered cultural anxieties about working-class leisure activities in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on two of Harkness’s novels, A City Girl and In Darkest London, it argues that, for working women in Harkness’s fiction, leisure may be difficult to access and often becomes another form of work. Comparing Harkness’s characters to women in other contemporary texts such as Liza of Lambeth, it shows how leisure pursuits often reflect and reproduce social dangers and structures of oppression for unmarried working-class women.Less
This chapter places the leisure pursuits of female characters in Harkness’s fiction in a broader context of gendered cultural anxieties about working-class leisure activities in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on two of Harkness’s novels, A City Girl and In Darkest London, it argues that, for working women in Harkness’s fiction, leisure may be difficult to access and often becomes another form of work. Comparing Harkness’s characters to women in other contemporary texts such as Liza of Lambeth, it shows how leisure pursuits often reflect and reproduce social dangers and structures of oppression for unmarried working-class women.
Fred Botting
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719077548
- eISBN:
- 9781781701904
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719077548.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
All of Gothic fiction turns upon a simple oscillation, on a singular differentiation, a child's game: ‘fort!’ ‘Da!’ A game of loss and recovery, with the former rather than latter in the driving ...
More
All of Gothic fiction turns upon a simple oscillation, on a singular differentiation, a child's game: ‘fort!’ ‘Da!’ A game of loss and recovery, with the former rather than latter in the driving seat, its simplicity belies an extensive recalcitrance, its repetitions occluding some kind of excess to efforts of representation and theorisation. Repetition defies neat models of life and self; it disrupts ordered and balanced circulations of pleasure, desire or identity; it introduces something alien into normal functions and expectations, something that, though inassimilable to sense, remains at the heart of subjectivity and culture. The death drive introduces heterogeneity, difference and something daemonic into everyday exchange. It is Sigmund Freud, of course, who speculates on the significance of the child's game. The game played by his grandson intrudes on the grandfather's hesitant, repetitive and circuitous pursuit of the hypothesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Loss and recovery, repetition and the shock of overwhelming stimulation underlie the attempt to identify what lurks ‘beyond the pleasure principle’.Less
All of Gothic fiction turns upon a simple oscillation, on a singular differentiation, a child's game: ‘fort!’ ‘Da!’ A game of loss and recovery, with the former rather than latter in the driving seat, its simplicity belies an extensive recalcitrance, its repetitions occluding some kind of excess to efforts of representation and theorisation. Repetition defies neat models of life and self; it disrupts ordered and balanced circulations of pleasure, desire or identity; it introduces something alien into normal functions and expectations, something that, though inassimilable to sense, remains at the heart of subjectivity and culture. The death drive introduces heterogeneity, difference and something daemonic into everyday exchange. It is Sigmund Freud, of course, who speculates on the significance of the child's game. The game played by his grandson intrudes on the grandfather's hesitant, repetitive and circuitous pursuit of the hypothesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Loss and recovery, repetition and the shock of overwhelming stimulation underlie the attempt to identify what lurks ‘beyond the pleasure principle’.
Charlie Blake
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748642618
- eISBN:
- 9780748671755
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748642618.003.0010
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter makes an attempt to grasp the tension between coming and becoming in Deleuze's philosophy. Grappling with Deleuze's operative dualisms between pleasure and desire, and thereby also with ...
More
This chapter makes an attempt to grasp the tension between coming and becoming in Deleuze's philosophy. Grappling with Deleuze's operative dualisms between pleasure and desire, and thereby also with ontological questions of equivocity and univocity, Blake discusses the very different, but equally crucial approaches to sex offered by Spinoza and Reich. While Spinozist philosophy allows Deleuze to insert sensual pleasure and desire within an immanent causality, Reich offers a politicisation of sexuality that Deleuze and Guattari appreciate but also an external and therefore equivocal distinction and causality between the two. Proposing the angelic as a means of encompassing both desire and pleasure, and both immanence and politics, Blake works to situate actual sex within a philosophy which is reluctant to allow for the orgasmic within its desiring web of connections.Less
This chapter makes an attempt to grasp the tension between coming and becoming in Deleuze's philosophy. Grappling with Deleuze's operative dualisms between pleasure and desire, and thereby also with ontological questions of equivocity and univocity, Blake discusses the very different, but equally crucial approaches to sex offered by Spinoza and Reich. While Spinozist philosophy allows Deleuze to insert sensual pleasure and desire within an immanent causality, Reich offers a politicisation of sexuality that Deleuze and Guattari appreciate but also an external and therefore equivocal distinction and causality between the two. Proposing the angelic as a means of encompassing both desire and pleasure, and both immanence and politics, Blake works to situate actual sex within a philosophy which is reluctant to allow for the orgasmic within its desiring web of connections.
Brett Mills
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637515
- eISBN:
- 9780748671229
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637515.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Television
This chapter argues the sitcom is an especially important genre for thinking about television audiences because comedy is a form of communication that relies on audience response for its effect. The ...
More
This chapter argues the sitcom is an especially important genre for thinking about television audiences because comedy is a form of communication that relies on audience response for its effect. The chapter examines sitcom tropes such as the laugh track, to examine how the audience is signalled within the genre. It also explores audience reactions via complaints, and examines what such complaints tell us about audience expectations for the genre. This is also linked to issues of broadcasting regulations. The chapter draws on primary research with comedy audiences carried out for this book.Less
This chapter argues the sitcom is an especially important genre for thinking about television audiences because comedy is a form of communication that relies on audience response for its effect. The chapter examines sitcom tropes such as the laugh track, to examine how the audience is signalled within the genre. It also explores audience reactions via complaints, and examines what such complaints tell us about audience expectations for the genre. This is also linked to issues of broadcasting regulations. The chapter draws on primary research with comedy audiences carried out for this book.
Anna Powell
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748632824
- eISBN:
- 9780748651139
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748632824.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter analyses the popularisation of altered consciousness in drugs-oriented films. It provides a critical analysis of several relevant films including Kenneth Anger's 1954 Inauguration of the ...
More
This chapter analyses the popularisation of altered consciousness in drugs-oriented films. It provides a critical analysis of several relevant films including Kenneth Anger's 1954 Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Dennis Hopper's 1968 Easy Rider and Darren Aronofsky's 2001 Requiem for a Dream. The chapter investigates how far each film impacts on us as an affective agent of becoming and alters consciousness. It discusses how particular stylistic techniques, such as abstraction and anamorphosis, might induce virtual narcosis by cinematic hallucination, and explains that this process is elucidated through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of molecularity. The chapter contends that cinema offers an aesthetic parallel in its capacity to expand mundane modes of perception and thought.Less
This chapter analyses the popularisation of altered consciousness in drugs-oriented films. It provides a critical analysis of several relevant films including Kenneth Anger's 1954 Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Dennis Hopper's 1968 Easy Rider and Darren Aronofsky's 2001 Requiem for a Dream. The chapter investigates how far each film impacts on us as an affective agent of becoming and alters consciousness. It discusses how particular stylistic techniques, such as abstraction and anamorphosis, might induce virtual narcosis by cinematic hallucination, and explains that this process is elucidated through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of molecularity. The chapter contends that cinema offers an aesthetic parallel in its capacity to expand mundane modes of perception and thought.
Derek Attridge
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748640089
- eISBN:
- 9780748652112
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748640089.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter describes what might be called a Derridean reading of its most significant concept, the punctum, concentrating on The Pleasure of the Text and The Empire of Signs, which play a special ...
More
This chapter describes what might be called a Derridean reading of its most significant concept, the punctum, concentrating on The Pleasure of the Text and The Empire of Signs, which play a special role in Roland Barthes' writings on the image. Barthes' last work, Camera Lucida, is one of his most powerful and haunting. He is somewhat cannier in Camera Lucida, but is still unable to escape the structural predicament his project has placed him in. Barthes' practice shows that the referent is not the source of photography's special power – though the referential may indeed be crucial. The passage of time – and the work of artists, critics and readers – is continually altering the relations of coded meanings and uncoded effects.Less
This chapter describes what might be called a Derridean reading of its most significant concept, the punctum, concentrating on The Pleasure of the Text and The Empire of Signs, which play a special role in Roland Barthes' writings on the image. Barthes' last work, Camera Lucida, is one of his most powerful and haunting. He is somewhat cannier in Camera Lucida, but is still unable to escape the structural predicament his project has placed him in. Barthes' practice shows that the referent is not the source of photography's special power – though the referential may indeed be crucial. The passage of time – and the work of artists, critics and readers – is continually altering the relations of coded meanings and uncoded effects.
Peter Pesic
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262027274
- eISBN:
- 9780262324380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262027274.003.0010
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Throughout his life, the great mathematician Leonhard Euler spent most of his free time on music, to which he devoted his first book. This chapter discusses how he reformulated the ordering of ...
More
Throughout his life, the great mathematician Leonhard Euler spent most of his free time on music, to which he devoted his first book. This chapter discusses how he reformulated the ordering of musical intervals on a new mathematical basis. For this purpose, Euler devised a “degree of agreeableness” that numerically indexed musical intervals and chords, replacing ancient canons of numerical simplicity with a new criterion based on pleasure. Euler applied this criterion (and Aristotle’s teachings about the pleasure of tragedy) to argue that minor intervals and chords evoke sadness through their greater numerical complexity, hence lower degree of agreeableness than the major. This work involved extensive attention to ratios and numerical factorization immediately preceding his subsequent interest in continued fractions and number theory. Having devised a new kind of index, Euler was prepared to put forward indices that would address novel problems like the Königsberg bridge problem and the construction of polyhedra, basic concepts of what we now call topology.
Throughout the book where various sound examples are referenced, please see http://mitpress.mit.edu/musicandmodernscience (please note that the sound examples should be viewed in Chrome or Safari Web browsers).Less
Throughout his life, the great mathematician Leonhard Euler spent most of his free time on music, to which he devoted his first book. This chapter discusses how he reformulated the ordering of musical intervals on a new mathematical basis. For this purpose, Euler devised a “degree of agreeableness” that numerically indexed musical intervals and chords, replacing ancient canons of numerical simplicity with a new criterion based on pleasure. Euler applied this criterion (and Aristotle’s teachings about the pleasure of tragedy) to argue that minor intervals and chords evoke sadness through their greater numerical complexity, hence lower degree of agreeableness than the major. This work involved extensive attention to ratios and numerical factorization immediately preceding his subsequent interest in continued fractions and number theory. Having devised a new kind of index, Euler was prepared to put forward indices that would address novel problems like the Königsberg bridge problem and the construction of polyhedra, basic concepts of what we now call topology.
Throughout the book where various sound examples are referenced, please see http://mitpress.mit.edu/musicandmodernscience (please note that the sound examples should be viewed in Chrome or Safari Web browsers).
