John Ó Maoilearca
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816697342
- eISBN:
- 9781452952291
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816697342.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter explains why Laruelle thinks that philosophy is the very form of domination in thought by showing how a range of philosophers, from Locke and Kant through to Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou and ...
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This chapter explains why Laruelle thinks that philosophy is the very form of domination in thought by showing how a range of philosophers, from Locke and Kant through to Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou and the “new realists”, each replicate – in different ways – a structure of power that victimizes individuals who do not fulfill their definitions of objective, detached, human thinking.Less
This chapter explains why Laruelle thinks that philosophy is the very form of domination in thought by showing how a range of philosophers, from Locke and Kant through to Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou and the “new realists”, each replicate – in different ways – a structure of power that victimizes individuals who do not fulfill their definitions of objective, detached, human thinking.
S. Pearl Brilmyer
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226815770
- eISBN:
- 9780226815794
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226815794.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This introduction engages recent work in character studies, post-humanist theory, and science studies to challenge the longtime association of character with subjectivity, agency, and the self. The ...
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This introduction engages recent work in character studies, post-humanist theory, and science studies to challenge the longtime association of character with subjectivity, agency, and the self. The Science of Character shows how what scholars have long recognized as the hallmarks of nineteenth-century realist character—individuality, interiority, and the capacity for intellectual and moral growth—would be replaced between the years of 1870 and 1920 with a much more materialist set of ideals: plasticity (discussed in chapter 1), impressibility (chapter 2), spontaneity (chapter 3), impulsivity (chapter 4), relationality (chapter 5), and vitality (coda). The introduction invokes these concepts in order to draw attention to the aesthetic and philosophical innovations of the Victorian novelists George Eliot and Thomas Hardy and to link these innovations to the emergence of the New Realism in the 1880s and ’90s. In cultivating a more materialist approach to the human, late Victorian realists would do more than revise the qualifications for what counted as a realistic character. They would entirely redraw the lines according to which reality itself had been partitioned, insisting on the power of the literary to offer insight into the workings of nature, in addition to culture.Less
This introduction engages recent work in character studies, post-humanist theory, and science studies to challenge the longtime association of character with subjectivity, agency, and the self. The Science of Character shows how what scholars have long recognized as the hallmarks of nineteenth-century realist character—individuality, interiority, and the capacity for intellectual and moral growth—would be replaced between the years of 1870 and 1920 with a much more materialist set of ideals: plasticity (discussed in chapter 1), impressibility (chapter 2), spontaneity (chapter 3), impulsivity (chapter 4), relationality (chapter 5), and vitality (coda). The introduction invokes these concepts in order to draw attention to the aesthetic and philosophical innovations of the Victorian novelists George Eliot and Thomas Hardy and to link these innovations to the emergence of the New Realism in the 1880s and ’90s. In cultivating a more materialist approach to the human, late Victorian realists would do more than revise the qualifications for what counted as a realistic character. They would entirely redraw the lines according to which reality itself had been partitioned, insisting on the power of the literary to offer insight into the workings of nature, in addition to culture.
