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Animal Moments in Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin and Saul Bellow's Herzog
This paper studies sinthomatique writing in Saul Bellow’s Herzog in the form of letter-writing. Referring to Lacanian theory, the Sinthome is discussed in the study as a system of signification that exploits the unconscious digging for jouissance. Connected to jouissance in writing unconscious, the Sinthome is the fourth ring in the Borromean knot that protects a subject against psychosis by intersecting the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real orders. This study further develops the idea of the Sinthome in relation to the Four Lacanian Discourses. In respect to Discourses of the Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst, the following procedure is introduced for a subject excluded spatially and socially: foreclosure of master signifier, rejection of desire, reception of jouissance, and communication of the unconscious. The subject in above-mentioned moves needs a sinthome to protect his/her subjectivity against disintegration. Regarding Jacques Lacan’s example about James Joyce in using specific styles and epiphany, letter-writing is introduced as the Sinthome in Herzog that helps Herzog deliver his subjectivity from dissolution. Herzog is a character on the verge of breakdown and madness after his second divorce. He reconfigures his subjectivity when he forecloses AMERICA as master signifier, no longer enjoys knowledge, receives contradictions and truth, and ultimately jots down his unconscious. Finally, the role of the Sinthome is explored in the production of art. The Sinthome is considered as a kind of unique discourse through which a psychotic artist is enabled to originate new artistic productions. © Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved.
'Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own.' In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century. These lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable and prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world. Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. As creatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behaviour and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne. A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.
Martin Amis: Intoxicating, Free-the Novelist Life
- Martin Amis
- Edmundo Paz Soldán
Amis, Martin, and Edmundo Paz Soldán. "Martin Amis: Intoxicating, Free-the
Novelist Life." The Daily Telegraph 14 Oct. 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
culture/hay-festival/8825242/Martin-Amis-intoxicating-free-the-novelist-life.
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