Taking the Body as Model ‒Lyotard and Reflection‒

Peter W. Milne 한국철학회 2019 哲學 Vol.- No.141

This paper takes as its object two writings by the “late” Lyotard on the notion of reflection. While Lyotard’s best known and most sustained engagement with this notion is to be found in his various writings on Kant, and particularly in the first chapter of the Leçons sur l’Analytique du sublime, this study contextualizes this discussion in terms of an earlier essay, “Si l’on peut penser sans corps.” The rationale for this is to attempt to situate the more technical discussion of Kant in the Leçons in terms of some of the broader concerns of the late Lyotard’s work on the affect, particularly with regard to the relation of the latter to both thinking and the body.

In Statu Nascendi: Subjectivity and the Beautiful in Lyotard

( Peter W. Milne ) 한국미학회 2020 美學 Vol.86 No.4

While Lyotard’s interest in the sublime is well known, his later investigations of the beautiful are much less so. In part this seems to have to do with his own evolving views toward the beautiful as an aesthetic category, which in much of his best-known writings appears mostly to be aligned with representation and thus with Classicism and the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, there is another and more subtle understanding of the beautiful to be found in Lyotard, where it is even found alongside the sublime and what he calls, following Freud, “unconscious affect.” In these works, the beautiful appears to take on another relevance, and may even help us to begin to take the full measure of the “philosophy of the affect” that Lyotard seems to be largely engaged in during many of his last writings. This essay is an attempt to begin this process by giving a detailed reading of one of the major of these texts, in order, on the one hand, to show how the beautiful comes to be counted alongside the sublime and unconscious affect, and on the other, to make some suggestions about how it differs from them and might thus offer a broader understanding of Lyotard’s late account of affectivity. This reading of the beautiful appears most clearly in an essay devoted to the Kantian judgment of taste entitled “Sensus Communis.” I try to elucidate the main contours of this argument in terms of the split in Kant’s sensus communis that Lyotard introduces there: a communis that is formed not by any shared sensibility but by the “voices” of the faculties themselves; and the sentiment of beauty as a sensus that exceeds not only the faculties of knowledge and action but even the conscious subject itself. As with the later conception of the sublime and unconscious affect, the beautiful here appears as a very specific “temporal crisis” that undoes the temporalization of the subject. In this sense, it is consistent with other readings of the affect in this stage of Lyotard’s writings. Nonetheless, it also differs in that it is time in statu nascendi, in the state of birth, and as a result I argue that it seems to figure a certain promise that is absent in both the sublime and unconscious affect, even if that promise is always and only ever to come.

A Cosmopolitical Philosophy to Come: Derrida and the Ends of Humanity

Peter W. Milne 이화여자대학교 이화인문과학원 2012 탈경계인문학 Vol.5 No.1

Although Derrida is often taken to be “anti‐humanist,” this paper argues that his engagement with the legacy of humanism is not only much more complex, but that it retains and alters this legacy in such a way as to provide a new way of thinking about the human in a trans‐national or “global” context. This argument is at the same time an occasion to briefly explore some of the implications of this for Derrida’s relation to philosophy as a humanistic discipline. It first tracks some of Derrida’s most explicit discussions of humanism over the course of several works and lines of inquiry, showing what I take to be a shift in his work from the critical stance of “The Ends of Man” to the more nuanced discussions in some of the later “political” writings. My main goal is to link Derrida’s discussions of humanism to his work on cosmopolitanism and particularly to his argument that political thinking must negotiate the troubling but important legacy of a philosophical universalism that is nonetheless tied to a very particular cultural and historical past. I take this problem to be analogous to the ambiguity of a humanist legacy that is potentially violent and limiting in its conception of universal humanity while being at the same time what underwrites important political concepts such as human rights. Derrida argues that philosophy is the “other way” and is thus always open to redirection and reappropriation by traditions other than its own. Taking the “human” as an Idea in the Kantian sense, I argue that it too can wander from its end, liberate itself from the strictures of universal humanity while nonetheless retaining the promise and the political consideration due that humanity. Derrida thus offers an innovative way to rethink the humanist legacy in the context of a plurality of cultures. I end by suggesting that philosophy and the humanities more generally, far from being irrelevant, may thus be more relevant than ever.

The Normalization of Universal Male Conscription in South Korean Society and the State Regulation of Draft Evasion and Conscientious Objection: 1950–1993

Peter W. MILNE 이화여자대학교 이화인문과학원 2014 탈경계인문학 Vol.7 No.3

This paper traces the history of conscientious objection and draft evasion in Republic of Korea, from the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 to the end of the militarized regimes in 1993. Much focus will be given to the process in which universal male conscription was established and solidified as a social norm in South Korean society. It was during the Korean War period when universal male conscription began to be negatively perceived as a “poor man’s draft” and led to rampant draft evasion that the Syngman Rhee regime (1948- 1960) failed to control. The normalization process began during the militarized regime of Chung-hee Park (1961–1979), when social impetuses were established alongside hegemonic masculinity and gender hierarchy to necessitate the completion of compulsory military service for men to function in society. It also coincided with the increased criminalization of draft evasion, as well as the persecution and stigmatization of religious conscientious objectors in South Korea, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists, who were viewed indifferently from draft evaders. The negative labeling of draft evader and conscientious objectors as social deviants was also a state-led initiative to solidify universal male conscription as a social norm. This process was supported by the implementation of a national surveillance system which made possible the intensification of a nation-wide crackdown on draft evasion and conscientious objection. Much of the historical narrative will be analyzed using Foucauldian approaches to disciplinary mechanisms; in this case, normalization, surveillance and delinquency. The successful implementation of these disciplinary mechanisms perpetuated the normalized existence of universal male conscription and the persecution of its objectors, and its firm standing in South Korean society exemplifies the power of normalization.

Enframing: Art’s Epoche and the Promethean Community

Peter W. Milne 이화여자대학교 이화인문과학원 2014 탈경계인문학 Vol.7 No.3

This essay takes as its point of departure a little known text by Jean-François Lyotard on art and its relation to global networks of telecommunication in order to explore the possibilities for social and political communities in the context of global capital. Borrowing Heidegger’s notion of an “enframing” (Gestell) of nature by technology, Lyotard inquires into a similar enframing of art, arguing that art, through the very fact that it is an unprogrammable kind of techne, has the power to “suspend” the programs of what he calls “capitalist technoscience,” and in so doing works against the loss of originality such programs produce. Linking this to Lyotard’s famous discussion of the avantgarde, I examine the potential political force of such a suspension or “epoche,” particularly with regard to the formation of possible publics in the absence of world historical “grand narratives” that would situate a universal human subject within a particular conception of historical progress. Lyotard argues that the Idea (in the Kantian sense) of totality no longer unproblematically provides the horizon for political thought. Any such cosmopolitan community is therefore problematic, communities can only be formed in the absence of necessarily shared qualities or traits. They must therefore be “promethean” in the sense of being creative, daring, and open to reinterpretation. Not only is this not something to be lamented, however, it is something that should be affirmed for the open possibilities it offers.