“Man is
something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”
Nietzsche
Within
post-Enlightenment thought supremacy of a disembodied and ahistorical Cartesian
subject, surveying the objective world lying before and imparting it meaning in
accordance to its own wishes, becomes the ground of what is understood as being
human. This anthropocentric conception, challenged in various manners—most
comprehensively in Heidegger’s reformulation of human subject as Dasein—within
the history of ideas, however remains the frame of reference till the end of
20th century. With the advent of 1990s epistemologies are remodelled, tracing
their roots to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, to incorporate first an
anti-human strain of thought and then, subsequently, announce the death of a
coherent human subject—whether in Derrida’s concept of differánce, or in
Foucault’s dirge on death of man with the corollary of the author being reduced
to a “function”—as an essential and stable entity, an announcement that
contributed to a scattered and de-constructed postmodern landscape of mind.
During this
inclement climate for the essential human subject, discursive practices around
the duality of mind and body—seeds of which were sown in the epistemological
dialectic of the rationalists and the empiricists in the beginning of
Enlightenment itself—reify into a fracture between the two. Literature
contributes to this thought by conceptualizing body as a (corporeal) trap,
never opted for willingly, against the liberating force of mind that allows for
transcendence over bodily limitations. Experimental outlook from various
writers all through the 20th century—Woolf’s idea of body in multiple spaces
and time, Kafka’s metamorphosis of bodily realm, Kundera’s exploration of body
through history, and Pynchon’s cybernetics—underline this fracture through a
rethinking of the duality of mind and body. In the latter half of 20th century
this fracture translates itself into disintegrated and disorganized body within
the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari through their conceptualization of
body without organs (BoW) – a polymorphous disintegration of conventional body
for literal and conceptual understanding. As deterritorialized site of desire
this body of the subject gets transformed into a mechanical force that breaks
socially articulated and regularised structures through non-natural
assimilations – frozen foetuses, organ transplant, uterus exchange, male
pregnancies, androgynous bodies, etc.
Against the
impending dissolution of its facticity bodily roots of subjectivity are given
up for new epistemological order, impelled by the discourses of technology and
capital, that defines the individual as one who can ‘embody’ different
identities and exist in the world through heterogeneous modes. Around this
epistemology are built of many twentieth century postmodern discursions in the
fields of Sociology, Anthropology and Humanities where the dis-embodied
Cartesian subject gets to transform into an em-bodied one. The most trenchant
critique of the Cartesian subject, at this time, is the emergence of the
‘posthuman,’ through heterogeneous exegetical endeavours, as the possibility of
transformation on the level of both physical body and mental realm. Within this
strain of thought there is constant grapple between the mind and the body as
two disparate and individual entities where body, now seen to be equally crucial,
gets replaced by mechanical ones within the fantasy of technological worldview.
Posthuman thus brings together man and machine—there being no essential
demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulations, biological
organisms and cyborgs—to redefine the contours of human existence in terms of
how we see ourselves and the nature of society we wish to create. Technology,
foremost in increasing the potency of body by manifesting it, aids in the
extension of human experience through a continuity of mind and body mechanisms
thus overturning the primacy of mind as the superior power. Through the themes
of simulation technology, cybernetics, and robotic uprisings etc. the
exploration of ‘posthuman,’ while decentring an almost redundant human subject,
creates multiple new ways of engaging the receding discursive space allotted to
human subject. Within literature, as in reality where they have created
mechanized bodies that are paradoxically being seen as a potential threat to an
already beleaguered human existence, representation of this struggle is
sketched across vast spectrum of science fiction, (LGTB) queer body,
desubjectification, modern and postmodern rethinking of the centrality of mind
over body and vice-versa along with coordinates of space and time.
Interested
scholars can go through the series of topics provided to think over the issue
without being limited to them:
- Cloning and Cyborg culture
- Artificial Birth
- Eugenics and Ethics
- Cybernetic Humans: dystopia or Utopia? Situating human in Posthuman
- Body without Organ(BwO): Refracting through Artaud and Deleuze and Guattari
- The Ship of Theseus or the Theseus Paradox: Problematising ‘essense’ of identity
- Body as space in time or vice versa
- Human: Prosthetic God?
- Fantasmatic desires: overcoming Anxiety of Death and semblance (illusions) of immortality
- Reclaiming or recovering body in literature and Visual Arts
- Becoming animal, becoming the other
- Production of the Rhythms of Desire: a contested plane
- Corporeal Body as the Condition of possibility of Transendence
- Holism: a reconsideration of human world
Only
complete papers will be considered for publication. The papers need to be
submitted according to the latest guidelines of the MLA format. You are welcome
to submit full length papers (not less than 3500 words) along with a 150 words
abstract, list of keywords, bio-note, and word count (in a separate word doc)
on or before 30th August, 2019. Please put the name of the CFP you are
submitting for in the subject line. Although the authors are free to submit
till the deadline, we really appreciate early submissions.
Necessary author guidelines. Please email your
submissions and queries to llids.journal@gmail.com.
Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies Journal (click on the cover at bottom left corner to view the latest
issue)
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario