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"Empathy as Orientation Rather than Feeling: Why Empathy Is Ethically Complex" published on 01 Jan 2017 by Brill | Rodopi.
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Adi Ophir has suggested that the political realm is an order of evils, producing and managing regular forms of suffering and violence rather than eliminating them. Thus, the political is always to some extent a corrupted order of justice. Emmanuel Levinas’ work presents in its focus on the face-to-face relationship a means of rethinking how to make the political more open to compassionate justice. Though Levinas himself doesn’t sufficiently take on this question, I argue that his work facilitates a way of thinking about commiserative shame that provides a means to connect the face-to-face to its potential effects in the political sphere. If such shame isn’t ignored or bypassed, it produces an unsettling relation to the other that in its adversity motivates a kind of responsibility and care for the other that can alter the public sphere.
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Scarry's (The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, New York, 1985) broke crucial ground in examining the antagonisms between pain, embodiment and language, and the isolating effects of pain as experience. This paper submits Scarry's claim that extreme pain destroys language, evades mediation, and isolates the subject to critical scrutiny, arguing instead that pain is a semiosomatic force, a form of feeling generated by imperative information about embodiment (real or imaginary) that works to disarticulate and move the subject and the social environment. Pain is not predominantly antagonistic to language; rather, pain insists on signifying, with language being only one of its performative media. What pain resists is representation, not the informational force exerted through language and other semiotic forms. Rather than unmaking language, pain disarticulates and rearticulates subjectivity, refashioning interrelations between the body, subjectivity, others, and culture in ongoing processes of largely aversive impingement, embroiling subjectivity with the imperative directives of embodied vulnerability. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
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Personality theories, as Giordano (2014) argues, often treat Western versions of the self as having universal import. Eastern notions of self, however, offer a dramatically different basis for thinking about what personality might be. This paper, nonetheless, seeks to offer a general framework for theorizing about the epiphenomenon of personality in any culture, asserting that it is an effect of specific histories of ideological practices, semiotic networks and systems, and affect, which engage each other in dialogic and dialectical ways. The interactions of these factors, guided by ideology, regularize behavior and affective dynamics, largely in non-personal ways. Subjects are produced and reproduced from these complex interactions, which are situationally specific and simultaneously transpersonal. The subjects formed through these interactions are the basis for the folk psychology of personality, which treats the transient, varying effects of these interactions as more or less reified qualities that form a basis for the construction of selfhood, however conceived.
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The second volume of Annals of Cultural Psychology is dedicated to the affective nature of human social relationships with the environment. The chapters here included explore the historical, theoretical and practical dimensions of the concept of affectivating originally introduced by one of us (Valsiner, 1999), as a potential tool of inquiry into the affective-sensitive dimension of psychological life within a cultural-psychological framework. The concept of affectivating involves two psychological dimensions often undervalued or even obliterated from contemporary cultural psychology, namely the affective involvement and the agentivity of people in their social encounters. Through several examples --‘feeling-at-home’, silence spaces and rituals, memorials, music and poetry, among others-- we show individual’s concrete actions in mundane everyday life aim to give an affective personal sense to the world around. This focuses on the primary affective nature of human meaning construction that guides the person in one’s continuing feeling-into-the-world. At a theoretical level the notion of affectivation challenges contemporary Cultural Psychology to rescue subjectivity, not only symbolism. Affectivation propounds a return to the long, but partially forgotten, organismic tradition, represented in the history by thinkers like Wilhelm Dilthey, Jakob von Uexküll and Kurt Goldstein. Cultural psychology has to bring semiosis back to the vital background of human experience.
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