New Journal and CFP: Inscriptions, Vol. 1, No. 1

Consecrations: The Philosophy of Wolfgang Schirmacher and the Passing of the Human

Inscriptions, a journal of contemporary thinking on art, philosophy, and psycho-analysis, invites contributions to our inaugural issue on consecration, the philosophy of Wolfgang Schirmacher, and the notion of passing. We are looking for well-crafted and skilfully written scholarly essays and literary contributions that engage our mandate and the theme of this issue.

Passing: to pass for someone, to pass something by, to pass away; these are senses in which the term passing can be made meaningful in our lives, and in how we approach our lives in art. In psycho-analysis hold it possible to act in such a way that the subject leaves the domain of legal competency and enter into a state where we no longer can be held accountable for our acts, as well as protocols for the end of analysis, i.e., when the analysand passes into the analyst. In philosophy the term seems particularly apt as a description of the way we move from the world of humanism to that which lies beyond it. To Wolfgang Schirmacher the notion of Homo generator serves to address the uncertainties of our epoch of modern technology. It is a form that generates human reality in a climate of artificiality and ecocide. Homo generator is a media artist promising a Dasein without a need for Being, certainty or simple notions of progress. The lighting of truth (Heidegger) promised by Homo generator is supplemented by an art of forgetting: only in this manner can the media artist’s sanity remain in place.

Homo generator gives shape to just living under the aegis of an ethic that is forgotten or hidden: “Concealed from our consciousness, humans live ethically, a good life behind our backs. Only in feelings, in fascination, satisfaction, joy, but also in mourning do we get a hint of ethical worlds” (Schirmacher, “Cloning humans with media,” 2000). As with Heidegger’s claim that the light of consciousness needs to be shielded, Schirmacher’s ethical life-worlds are at their most present when they are hidden from view. This leads to a most unexpected thesis: that which we consecrate stands out as most worthy when it is hidden.

We seek academic papers and literary interventions that address questions such as:

• How can the term consecration make sense to art, literature, and philosophy?
• In what way can the work of Wolfgang Schirmacher, such as his figure of Homo generator, give reality to our epoch and our lived experiences?
• How can the term “passing” yield meaning in our approaches to art, psycho-analysis, and philosophy?

Submission instructions

• Deadline for proposals: 15 March 2018
• Deadline for full manuscripts: 15 April 2018

Academic essays should be 3,000 to 4,500 words. We also seek scholarship in the form of interviews, reviews, short interventions, disputations and rebuffals, and in these cases we are open to shorter texts. Inscriptions adheres to the Chicago Manual of Style (footnotes and bibliography). For other instructions, please see our website. We encourage potential authors to submit proposals for review prior to their writing/submitting entire full-length manuscripts. Include title, proposal (150 words), short biography, and institutional affiliation in your preliminary submission.

All academic submissions will undergo double-blind peer review.

Literary submissions (short and long poems, aphorisms, short fiction, fables and literary essays of up to 1800 words) will be reviewed by our fiction editor.

Submit proposals and literary fictions through our online platform at:

https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/ by 15 March 2018.

Torgeir Fjeld, PhD

Editor-in-Chief, Inscriptions

https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

Book Summary by Jeffrey M. Jackson

Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories

Genealogy and Convalescence 

by 

Jeffrey M. Jackson

This book presents a reading of Nietzsche as a thinker of the suffered social histories of subjectivity.  It suggests that Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of idealism needs the concept of convalescence to be coherent.  Genealogy is a form of reflection that traces the suffered scenes of which that reflection is symptomatic, whereas convalescence is the ordeal of reflection’s coming to bear its limits within scenes of embodied suffering.  Only convalescents can engage in genealogy. The term “scene” is borrowed from Freud’s appeal to infantile scenes, which shape subjectivity; the often-discussed commonality between Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche is found not in suspicion or hermeneutics, but rather in modelling the ordeal of a reflecting subject which traces its independence as a symptom of a more or less unbearable suffered historical dependence.  This theme is developed by appeals to Freud’s notion of mourning and the object relations theories of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, which insist on the primacy of suffered relationality in the genesis of subjectivity.   Moreover, Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics and its emphasis on the primacy of the object are suggested as an alternative context within which to read Nietzsche’s writing, in contrast with dominant modes of criticism.  From here, certain popular readings of Nietzsche are discussed: e.g. those by Kofman, Ricoeur, Foucault, Blondel, Haar, Deleuze, Derrida, etc.

Chapter One, “Convalescence, Mourning, and Sociality,” examines Nietzsche’s concept of convalescence by comparing it with the Freudian work of mourning.  In contrast with influential subjectivist readings of Nietzsche—specifically those of Derrida and Deleuze—the comparison with Freud helps to show the suffered nature of socio-historically embedded subjectivity.  For Freud, the mournful work to slowly decathect from all subtle attachments to the lost object; similarly, the convalescent undergoes a sustained labor of decathexis from ressentiment.  In his preoccupation with convalescence, Nietzsche is articulating the conditions for the possibility of the overcoming of bad culture for beings who carry the weight of that bad culture within their subjectivity.  That this salutary ordeal is conditioned by its relational context implies an imperative to transform social conditions. 

Chapter Two, “Relationality, Trauma, and the Genealogy of the Subject,” examines the first two essays of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality from the perspective of relational psychoanalysis, which insists on the genesis of human subjectivity from foundational relationships with others.  This suggests that naturalistic and other common interpretations of this text fail to do justice to the excessive, negative character of suffered social history.  Such interpretations often resort to subjectivist or quasi-metaphysical accounts of repression or instincts to explain the origins of bad conscience, for example.  Nietzsche’s position should rather be seen as proto-psychoanalytic in that his notion of bad conscience is best understood as a type of symptom, precisely because its source is not a naturalistically-conceived cause, but rather a socially-conditioned, concretely and symbolically-mediated ordeal.  This problem can be connected to passages in which Nietzsche discusses the suffered, social dimensions of shame and liberation.  Moreover, slaves’ morality is not merely a type expressive of subjective weakness, but the symptom of the unbearable history of the human animal that gave rise to subjectivity.  “Free will” is the fantasy of agency for beings who experience agency at unbearable.  On one hand this unbearable experience has material, historical dimensionality, with connections to slavery, trauma, physical weakness, sickness, etc.; on the other, it is reproduced symbolically as the basis of all meaning.  Far from ending in fatalism, this reading suggests that the path toward Nietzschean liberation leads through cultural convalescence from the weight of social—both material and symbolic—histories.

Chapter Three, “Nietzsche’s Negative Dialectics: Ascetic Ideal and Status Quo,” offers an account of Theodor Adorno’s philosophical position, which is then used to analyse various aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking.  Both thinkers interrogate the way in which the status quo is calcified within dominant forms of subjectivity—in the ascetic ideal for Nietzsche and the primacy of the subject in Adorno.  Consequently, neither thinker is merely advancing a subjectivist critique of identity—which would celebrate difference or the plurality of perspectives, for example.  Rather, they insist on the suffered objectivity of the non-identical.  In contrast to views of Nietzsche as valorizing immediacy, the body, necessity, or difference, one might see Nietzsche’s fragmentary style and critique of systems as expressions of a negative dialectics, based in the primacy of the object, in which subjectivity would trace and negotiate the suffered social histories that condition it.  From this perspective, the third essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy—and its focus on the ascetic ideal as the basis of the modern subject—can be read as a critique of modern culture and of the philosophy that seeks liberation from that culture.

Chapter Four, “Working-through Perspectives in Nietzsche and Object Relations Psychoanalysis,” provides a reading of certain aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking with that of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott.  For Klein, the infant begins in a primitive schizoid position from which the object (i.e. the world) is encountered as a precarious fluctuation from satisfying to persecuting, and a key developmental task in Kleinian psychoanalysis is the ability to integrate these primitive schizoid partial objects into a more holistic position.  Nietzsche’s critique of the opposition between Good and Evil, and his relating of the thought of eternal recurrence to the ability to embrace all aspects of existence can be read on this model as valorizing the integration of the nonintegrable.  Similarly, Winnicott’s concept of transitional phenomena presents a model of an environmentally-mediated ordeal of integrating subjectivity with objectivity, which is similar to Nietzsche’s account of subjectivity’s formation within suffered social scenes.  These thinkers suggest that purportedly “pure” or “independent” subjects are symptomatic of relational histories that have not gone well, and thereby need to be changed.

New Book by Jeffrey M. Jackson

Palgrave Macmillan presents:

Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories

Genealogy and Convalescence

by 

Jeffrey M. Jackson

This book presents a reading of Nietzsche as a thinker of the suffered social histories of subjectivity.  It suggests that Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy needs the concept of convalescence to be coherent. Genealogy is a form of reflection that traces the suffered scenes of which that reflection is symptomatic, whereas convalescence is the ordeal of reflection’s coming to bear its limits within scenes of embodied suffering.  This theme is developed by appeals to Freud’s notion of mourning and the object relations theories of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, which insist on the primacy of suffered relationality in the genesis of subjectivity.  Moreover, Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics and its emphasis on the primacy of the object are suggested as an alternative context within which to read Nietzsche’s writing, in contrast with dominant modes of criticism.  The discussion will appeal to anyone interested in Nietzsche, critical theory and the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Jeffrey M. Jackson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair or the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Houston—Downtown, USA.  He is the author of Philosophy and Working-through the Past: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Social Pathologies.

New Article in Research and Practice in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Does the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme 
enhance personal quality of life?

by David Treanor

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is a radical paradigm shift that moves the administration, quality framework and service delivery of disability services into the economic market-place in Australia.  The NDIS is the largest government reform since the introduction of Medicare in Australia under the Whitlam Government in the early 1970s. The NDIS was introduced in 2013 and will, if the roll-out is successful, be fully operationalized by 2020. The NDIS aims to ameliorate the limitations in the prior funding and monitoring state and territory based systems and is grounded in a rhetoric of ‘person-centered’ planning.

As a personalist the author explores this notion of ‘personal-planning’ and how ‘personal’ is it? And how congruent it might be with John Macmurray personalism?  Macmurray offers critical insights into our human nature, which suggests that personal flourishing, friendships have a valued role and are integral to our nature as persons. Macmurray is perceptive in understanding who a person is, he moves beyond the focus that is emphasized of persons as mere a material or mechanistic being and argues our development is best met through a relational being who excels through interdependent relationships. The paper reveals that though the NDIS honours Australia’s commitment to it’s international responsibilities under the 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), that is it has a broad personalist philosophy. Nonetheless, the analysis through a Macmurrian prism exposes the schemes shortcomings in its ability to enhance human nature of people with an intellectual disability that improves people’s quality of life. This argument follows the analysis of current data reports, as case studies, centered on the NDIS, and suggests that while the NDIS has improved some personal lives a more concentrated focus on Macmurrain human nature and relationships is more likely to support the scheme to achieve its overall objectives.

• https://doi.org/10.1080/23297018.2017.1408420