An Utterly Dark Spot: Gaze and Body in Early Modern Philosophy (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)
Language: English
Pages: 152
ISBN: 047211140X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies
Theodor Adorno (Routledge Critical Thinkers)
Critical Play: Radical Game Design
The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (Radical Thinkers)
States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century
The Dialectics of Liberation (Radical Thinkers)
transformations of one and the same eternally living body that always preserves the same soul, is a being that is already alive before birth and that continues living beyond death. In order to demonstrate that there is no birth in the strict sense, Leibniz refers to the microscopical observations of Swammerdam, Malpighi, and Leeuwenhoek, which undoubtedly prove the preexistence of life, that is, the presence of life before birth. 21 What they prove is that there is no "first birth" or "entirely
the affect of joy.) From the Lacanian-Freudian perspective, however, the true object of love, that is, the object that contains the cause of love within itself, is originally lost. (The only object loved for its own sake might be God.) An object containing the inherent cause for love is never encountered in reality-every finite object we love is loved for some accidental, partial resemblance that it bears to the originally lost object. This lost object, which is never encountered in reality, but
Contingent upon an exception to, and suspension of, the laws of nature, occasionalism is thus possible only in paradise-it is a philosophical reflection on an anomalous world. Whereas prelapsarian physiology made Adam's belief in the causal efficacy of God possible, that is, his love of God, postlapsarian physiology, in contrast, necessarily engenders and sustains belief in the causal efficacy of bodies, that is, the love of bodies. What is more, it was only as a result of the postlapsarian
the lantern there is enough light for the inspector to keep the books, yet he is-despite his partial visibility-no less invisible than he would be if he were spying on the prisoners, hidden in the depths of a completely dark lodge. In neither case can the prisoners determine with certainty that they are not being watched at any particular moment; the only difference is that, in the former case, they 108 An Utterly Dark Spot are led to believe that the inspector is watching them from the
Therefore, the inspector disguises his absence (he leaves the lantern surreptitiously: he lets himself out through a trapdoor in the floor and descends through the interior of the central tower) by placing "any opaque object,,38 in the lantern. The difference between an inanimate object, constantly at rest, and the inspector's body, occasionally in motion, would not be discernible, according to Bentham, because the apertures in the lantern are so small. At this point, what constitutes the spot