One of the difficulties that Braidotti seems to have in attempting to theorize the position of nomadic ontology is the overcoming on a dualistic structure intrinsic in a phallogocentric view of sexual relations. Indeed, the very idea of sexual relations suggests a dualistic structure based on male paradigms. Yet Braidotti upholds this distinction as a [...]
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Certeau’s Strategies and Tactics
In defining strategy and tactic, Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life suggests that the former maintains a dominance in a specific environment by the othering of “an exterior distinct from it”; the latter operates within the same environment by seizing opportunities which the tacticians (“others”) constantly generate. The other cannot escape the [...]
Leonardo, Machiavelli, and Modernism
What came out of this tradition during the Renaissance may be illuminated by the great “renaissance men” of the time like Leonardo, who, in his Notebooks, suggests a new art based on the pragmatic and verifiable, i.e., “true science” away from the religion and superstition of the Christian middle ages to observable, empirical truth and a trust in the capacities of humanity.
Eliot’s Tradition
T. S. Eliot’s aesthetic in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” borders on a sort of mysticism. Ostensibly concerned with the foundation and history of poetry, Eliot only addresses the contemporaneous effects of poetry — both on the poet and the poet’s milieu. The poet, to Eliot, rewords, or (re)creates, not new art, but new form in an individual expression. The poet lives and expresses “the present moment of the past” concentrating on poetry’s living substance.
Notes on Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”
Manifest content—the content of dreams that is retained in memory (148). Latent content—the relevant material discovered by analyzing the dream (148). Freud asks two questions: what is the psychical process that transforms latent content into manifest content, and what are the motives that necessitate this transformation? The former process he calls the “dream work,” while [...]
T.S. Eliot’s Formalism
T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” concerns itself with the literary text and how it relates to the reader, the writer, and the “real” world.
Poetics and Purgation
Plato’s banishment of the poets in his Republic is based upon an ideological and moral accusation: poets are imitators of things removed from reality and they cater to the emotions: the irrational nature of pity and fear.
