Sexual temporalities

Central European History, 1996

Symposium, 2010

Telos, 2019

In order to address the politics of temporal regulation and periodization, while considering ways in which competing religious and secular narratives construct contemporary subjectivity, this study compares the quasi-autobiographical narratives of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Looking beneath the surface differences between these two works, this study draws out surprising affinities and continuities between Zarathustra and the Confessions and compares each work’s vision of time and eternity. By examining Zarathustra’s parable of the gate and its punctuating moment (Augenblick) alongside Augustine’s notion of the distentio animi in Book 11 of the Confessions, this study questions competing Christian and anti-Christian narratives and their use of teleology and providence in the periodization of time, and concludes by contesting these narratives from the standpoint of postsecular critique.

Foucault Studies, 2023

This paper offers a conceptual reconstruction and empirical case study of an ofteneclipsed concept of Michel Foucault's genealogical project, confession. Departing from Foucault's dictum that his core research interest rests in the experience of the subject, I argue that, without a detailed understanding of diverse modalities of the confessional form, various subjectivation processes and epistemological procedures could not be fully grasped. In the first part, I systematise Foucault's incoherent confessional account against the backdrop of his entangled genealogies of modern man and the human sciences. Subsequently, I introduce a case study of a quantitative attitudinal survey based on face-to-face interviews to test Foucault's model of confession in present-day circumstances and demonstrate its sustaining analytical significance by disclosing the cognitive technique of coding behaviour. Thus far, governmentality studies have confronted positivistic methods in social sciences to display their objectifying functions. In contrast, I use the technique of coding behaviour to immerse into these scientific practices. Such a perspective delivers a fine-grained exposure of epistemological strategies in social sciences that are enabled by the appropriation of the confessional model and that constitute subjective identities on an individual and mass scale.

Art History, 2002

The question that the present paper addresses revolves around the aesthetic and critical implications generated by the radical recasting in postmodern fiction of the confessional mode in literary narrativity. The self-questioning tendency of firstperson narrative fiction (of all literature, according to DeMan), and the inescapable self-irony inherent even in confessional autobiography (as we learn from Rousseau"s canonical Les Confessions), are at the basis of my argument that the (pseudo)confessional mode in postmodern fictional narrativity is a further development in an already paradoxical literary form that has quite often challenged the frontiers, not only between fiction and autobiography, but also between the moralizing and the rebellious or sceptical tendencies of the novel genre. This paper aims at exploring the implications of the subversive quality that the confessional mode acquires in some of the postmodern narratives as they revisit the forms of life-writing (mainly the diary form and written confession) within the ironic mode. Through the discussion of Evan S. Connell"s The Diary of a Rapist and Kurt Vonnegut"s Mother Night, I mean to demonstrate that what I have called the "pseudoconfessional" mode is anchored in a postmodern aesthetics of surface that consecrates a deliberate problematization of literary meaning and of the ethical

Love is the desire to know without the temptation to stop learning. In this way, love is patiently engaged with time. Its intersubjectivity hinges on incompleteness. In this paper, I suggest that being in time favors desire over disdain, flow over stasis. In short, fidelity through flux prevents the perceptions that limit beings. (I intend both the omissions that reduce persons, and the hardened concepts that resist change.) I begin by citing Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas on the problem of reducing persons to ideological objects. I nuance a similarly harmful reduction of body to theologized spirit by integrating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “incarnated mind” and Jean-Luc Nancy’s “place-taking” body. I then draw a comparison with Casey’s project, which critiques the reduction of place to absolute time-space. Just as Casey privileges the concrete place over the abstract space, I turn to Edmund Husserl for a more plural sense of temporality. Husserl’s phenomenology of time, an interplay between “retention” and “protention,” resists a reduction of the present to an isolated moment. Tying together these strands—multi-dimensional approaches to time, place, and person—I conclude with Marcel’s call for patient perception, even hope, acknowledged in the “the pluralisation of the self in time.”

Norwegian …, 2006

Journal of Religion , 2024

This article offers an investigation of Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh—published in 2018, thirty-four years after the death of the author—through a literary approach. It argues that “The Laborious Baptism,” the second section of the first chapter of the book, “The Formation of a New Experience,” has an immersive quality of writing that signals a way of writing “from within,” to take up an expression coined by Emerson. By putting Foucault in conversation with James Bernauer, Willemien Otten, Philippe Büttgen, and Pierre Macherey, among others, this article aims to show that Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh may best be seen, in a final analysis, as a confessio fidei in the flesh. It owns, at some point, a mystical quality so that the book truly offers a peculiar experience to its readership. In the first part of the article, we make some metaliterary comments about the potential pitfalls of dealing with a posthumous book, helped by T. S. Eliot and Nietzsche. In the second part, we delve into “The Laborious Baptism” by making a close reading of it. In concluding remarks, we reflect on how Confessions of the Flesh may display a form of Christian parrhesia under the sign of risk-taking in keeping with Foucault’s ultima verba as a professor in his very last lecture at the Collège de France.

2016

This dissertation studies the way that shame can be a pharmakon-a toxic affect or an intoxicating form-with as much potential to heal as it has to harm. I argue that shame informs, inspires, and limits contemporary forms of autobiography. I begin and end the dissertation with works of literary criticism that are loosely autobiographical autobiographical. Ann Cvetkovich's Depression: A Public Feeling and Kate Zambreno's Heroines both aim to rebut traditional forms of literary criticism by writing in the form of memoir, thus generating a protective enclave for identities they call 'minor' (queer in the case of Cvetkovich, female in the case of Zambreno). Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? and Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station fictionalize their autobiographies thus questioning on both a fictional and a metafictional level whether or not anything-art, in particular-can have meaning. Maggie Nelson's Bluets traces the shame of heartbreak, depression and longing across two hundred and forty propositions, all of which are in hot pursuit of something blue. Anne Carson's Nox articulates the various shames of personality, subjectivity and identification, but also how writing itself can gesture to a less domesticated kind of shame: to the physiology of a book that blushes, averts its gaze, hunches its shoulders. In the end, we return to literary criticism, and find shame at the very farthest reaches of subjectivity, where the subject, literary critic Timothy Bewes, writes about shame as an event in the context of the postcolonial. Taken together, these works start to paint a portrait of a self (and of a critic) that is better described in terms such as 'becoming' where subjectivity has about it something contingent or temporary, a kind of self, in other words, that has relinquished much of its authority and therefore its capacity to dominate. The effect of these works is a collective overturning of the subject as a starting point for ethics primarily because such a move seems necessary if we ever want to escape the subject-object structure that has supported centuries of systemic inequality.

History and Theory, 2011

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging david hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a "history of time-consciousness" in twentieth-century European philosophy. hoy's book traces the turn-of-the-century debate between husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. for him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific-objective "time of the universe" and the phenomenology of human temporality, "the time of our lives." hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time-past/present/future-and to view objective-scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of hoy's work, I attempt to explore how "time" (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of "consciousness" (hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time-consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the other. In simple terms, I read hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the other rather than as a mode of the self's own "timeconsciousness," I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.

In this paper, I suggest that being in time favors desire over disdain, flow over stasis. In short, fidelity within flux prevents the perceptions that limit beings. Perception as ongoing allusion can expose these perceptual illusions—both the omissions that reduce persons, and the hardened concepts that resist change. I begin by citing Gabriel Marcel on the occurrence of reducing persons to ideological objects. I nuance a similarly harmful reduction of intersubjectivity to perceptual rigidity by integrating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “incarnated mind.” I then draw a comparison with Casey’s project, which critiques the reduction of place to absolute time-space. Just as Casey privileges concrete places over abstract space, I turn to Edmund Husserl for a more layered sense of temporality. Husserl’s phenomenology of time, as play between “retention” and “protention,” thwarts a reduction of the present to a now-point. Tying together these strands—multi-dimensional approaches to time, place, and person—I arrive at Levinas’ call for vigilance, and Marcel’s call for patient perception. Levinas’ “ethics of the infinite” approaches Marcel’s “metaphysics of hope,” especially resonant on Marcel’s conception of “the pluralisation of the self in time.” As Marcel writes, Patience seems, then, to suggest a certain temporal pluralism, a certain pluralisation of the self in time. It is radically opposed to the act by which I despair of the other person, declaring that he is good for nothing, or that he will never understand anything, or that he is incurable… The reductions exposed by these thinkers each enact a collapse of time’s dimensionality, a kind of despairing fatalism (“nothing…never…incurable”) or undifferentiating absolutism (everything…always…everywhere). I will conclude, then, not far from Marcel’s own position, by signaling the contributions of art and religion in preserving dimensionality and irreducibility. In their respective ways, both the arts and religious beliefs can startle the misperceptions that would otherwise deny the gifts of manifold time: forgiveness, change, hope. Both provide ways of resisting the violence of the fatum—which may be after all a fatal reduction of time, place, and spirited body. By modeling how the finite can engage an infinite, art and religion have the potential to reverse this violence: awakening us to a perception that is beyond the moment, beyond the single interpretation, even perhaps, beyond perception itself.