- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804775380
- eISBN:
- 9780804778978
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804775380.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
This chapter examines Franz Kafka's thoughts on the concept of distraction. It explains that Kafka questioned the ethical status of a principle of distraction and argued that if the principle were ...
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This chapter examines Franz Kafka's thoughts on the concept of distraction. It explains that Kafka questioned the ethical status of a principle of distraction and argued that if the principle were accepted, a reform of ethical concepts would have to follow. It analyzes Kafka's concept of “er” and explains that the disruption in the most unified and universal human activity in Aristotle and the recueil of misfires in the moral and ethical agent Jean de La Bruyère become a political phenomenon in Kafka's depiction of diasporic-dispersed-distracted “living.”Less
This chapter examines Franz Kafka's thoughts on the concept of distraction. It explains that Kafka questioned the ethical status of a principle of distraction and argued that if the principle were accepted, a reform of ethical concepts would have to follow. It analyzes Kafka's concept of “er” and explains that the disruption in the most unified and universal human activity in Aristotle and the recueil of misfires in the moral and ethical agent Jean de La Bruyère become a political phenomenon in Kafka's depiction of diasporic-dispersed-distracted “living.”
Thomas Irvine
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226667126
- eISBN:
- 9780226667263
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226667263.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
The author argues that the sonic history of the Sino-Western encounter in the decades around 1800 can be read as a hardening of Western imperial desire to dominate China, in part because the economic ...
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The author argues that the sonic history of the Sino-Western encounter in the decades around 1800 can be read as a hardening of Western imperial desire to dominate China, in part because the economic conditions became more favorable to such desire. The (literal) blocking out of China’s music signals a new kind of thinking about “music,” under the sign of increased hegemonic ambition. To Western ears, it seems, Chinese music was no longer just another instance of a universal human activity. From now on “music” was something that they, as elite Westerners, owned exclusively and that empowered them to feel superior. The Chinese—and Western subalterns too—were left to make do with “folklore.” Just as China became an object of new European economic and political empires, this “racialized music” became a sovereign subject of a new imperial music history.Less
The author argues that the sonic history of the Sino-Western encounter in the decades around 1800 can be read as a hardening of Western imperial desire to dominate China, in part because the economic conditions became more favorable to such desire. The (literal) blocking out of China’s music signals a new kind of thinking about “music,” under the sign of increased hegemonic ambition. To Western ears, it seems, Chinese music was no longer just another instance of a universal human activity. From now on “music” was something that they, as elite Westerners, owned exclusively and that empowered them to feel superior. The Chinese—and Western subalterns too—were left to make do with “folklore.” Just as China became an object of new European economic and political empires, this “racialized music” became a sovereign subject of a new imperial music history.
