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result(s) for
"Signification (Logic) in literature."
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Aristotle's Psychology of Signification
This book reconstructs the theory of signification implicit in Aristotle's De Interpretatione and its psychological background in his writing De Anima, a project often envisioned by scholars but never systematically undertaken. I begin by explaining what sort of phonetic material, according to Aristotle, can be a significans and a phônê. To that end, I provide a physiological account of which animal sounds count as phônê, as well as a psychological evaluation of the cognitive content of the phônai under consideration in De Interpretatione: names, verbs, and assertive sentences. I then turn to noêmata, which, for Aristotle, are the psychological reference and significata of names, verbs and assertive sentences. I explain what, for Aristotle, are the logical properties a significatum must have in order to be signified by the phonetic material of a name, verb or assertive sentence, and why noêmata can fulfil those logical conditions. Finally, I elucidate the significans-significatum relation without making use of the modern semantic triangle. This approach is consonant with Aristotle's methodology and breaks new ground by exploring the connection between the linguistic and psychological aspects of Aristotle's theory of signification.
eBook
The Rhetoric of Enhancing the Human
The task of this article is to explore the current state of bioethical debates over enhancement technologies as articulated through its two dichotomous ideological camps. It aims to explain why the conservative and posthumanist movements have reached a point where they fail to engage with each other and how we can reconceptualize the bioethical endeavor in a way that does not force the public to adhere to a framing of enhancement technologies as either universally desirable or abhorrent. In order to do so, I turn to the work of Lacan and Deleuze to explain why attempts to define what is essentially human always enter what I call “tropological regress,” or the endless procession of linguistic tropes that are artificially linked to transcendental conceptions of “the good.” I aim to diagnose why conservative and posthumanist discourses on enhancement technologies find themselves irreconcilably opposed.
Journal Article
\Talking Shit\ in Rayne: How Aesthetic Features Reveal Ethical Structures
\"Talking shit\" is a well-established social activity in many African American speech communities. This study of such talk by one speaker in a small south Louisiana town describes the dynamics of such talk as a negotiation, within a flexible set of forms, of the nature of the relationship between the speaker and the researcher in order to place the latter within a traditional framework of relationships between individuals. The study focuses on how the interactional order is embedded in the very structure of talk itself, revealing the potential logic behind what seems at first glance to be \"verbal filler\" but, I argue, actually is an extension of the larger worldview at work in speaking.
Journal Article
Nova Law: William S. Burroughs and the Logic of Control
There is a sense which courses through the work of William S. Burroughs and Gilles Deleuze, exemplified by Deleuze's appropriation of Burroughs' word \"control.\" Furthermore, \"control\" indexes a set of problems concerned with the functioning of language or, more explicitly, with the relations between word and image. Burroughs uses the \"cut-up technique\" to dismember these relations, while Deleuze seeks to short-circuit them in lines of flight, becomings, and war machines. In this sense, Deleuze and Burroughs share a common enemy, but an enemy with many names: globalisation, late capitalism, psychoanalysis, representation, Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, information, statistics, word virus ... all of these are the names of control. Deleuze and Burroughs, philosophy and literature-in this disjuncture, the most cynical and cold consequences of a law become tactical can be diagnosed.
Journal Article
\I am made an ass\: Falstaff and the Scatology of Windsor's Polity
[...] Gail Kern Paster, discerning a comic scatological imperative in A Midsummer Night's Dream footnotes the OED's claim that a pun on bottom/ass ... is not present in Elizabethan locution, yet she proceeds to argue for a somatic troping on Bottom's name by tracing the logic of purgation that structures the ass-headed Bottom's love affair with Titania.2 Likewise, in her essay on Shakespeare's use of the ass motif in Midsummer and The Comedy of Errors, Deborah Baker Wyrick allows the pun as a consequence of Renaissance pronunciation; for her, as for Paster, the pun is purely homonymic.3 Perhaps the most emphatic assertion of the pun's presence in Shakespeare belongs to Frankie Rubenstein, who boldly proclaims in her Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance, Shakespeare never used 'arse'; like his contemporaries, he used 'ass' to pun on the ass that gets beaten with a stick and the arse that gets thumped sexually, the ass that bears a burden and the arse that bears or carries in intercourse. All three words, overcoding one another, I ultimately put to the service of the following idea: that insofar as the butt of a joke figures, in Susan Purdie's words, as the locus of \"semantic excess,\" this excess is also somatically troped via the ass motif in Shakespeare's play.10 Moreover, as Falstaff becomes the ass, I argue that he also becomes the anal foundation, or fundament, upon which Windsor's diverse polity-fractured by gender, class, and national differences-can cohere.11 My reconsideration of Falstaff as the butt of Windsor's body politic might therefore be said to engage the scatological, comic politics of \"ass-making,\" drawing attention to the fundamental role of the ass in Merry Wives and, potentially, other early modern comedies as well.
Journal Article
A user's guide to thought and meaning
A profoundly arresting integration of the faculties of the mind - of how we think, speak, and see the world. Written with an informality that belies the originality of its insights and the radical nature of its conclusions, this is the author's most important book since his groundbreaking Foundations of Language in 2002.
eBook
ARCHĒ
I can say, perhaps a little playfully but not altogether inaccurately, that I have chosen to engage with the very first political concept—certainly in name, if nothing else. But as you will see, my reading is precisely to demonstrate how, from its initial invocation (from itsarchē, as it were), this concept renders any notions of the first, or of the one, impossible, indeterminable,an-archic. In this sense, though the word I am examining isarchē, the political concept I substantially engage with and care about is “anarchy,” whose elemental significance, I argue, is actually inherent in the archaic
Book Chapter
Radical Criticism and the Myth of the Split Self
A careful examination of the works of some radical discourses helps one better understand the logic of the split self. Radical discourses turn to the idea of the split self usually under the urge to deconstruct traditional binary oppositions and conceptual orders, and to criticize the power relationship implied in these conceptual orders.
Journal Article