This thesis examines James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and early cinema (c. 1895-1920) through Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. Instead of arguing for lines of direct influence between specific films and particular parts of Ulysses, I show that Joyce’s text and selected early films and film genres exhibit parallel philosophies. Ulysses and early cinema share similar ideas on the embodied nature of perception, the close relationship between mind and body, the intermingling of the human and the mechanical, intersubjectivity, and the subject’s inherence in the world. All of these shared ideas are inherently phenomenological. My phenomenological position on the Joyce-and-cinema relationship is at odds with a popular strain of scholarship which cites impersonality, neutrality, and automatism as the key linking factors between early cinema and modernist literature (including Joyce). ‘Joyce-and-cinema’ studies is a relatively large, and growing, field; as is ‘modernism-and-cinema’ studies. As well as ploughing my own path through an already crowded area, I analyse the different trends present (both historically and currently) in each area of study. I also add to the scholarship on phenomenological film theory by analysing the work of phenomenologically inflected film-philosophers and suggesting some new ways in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology might be used in the analysis of films and literature. I provide close analyses of several episodes of Ulysses and pay particular attention to ‘Ithaca’, ‘Circe’, ‘Nausicaa’, and ‘Wandering Rocks’. Several of Charlie Chaplin’s Mutual films are analysed, as are a select number of films by George Méliès. I also look at other trick-films, Irish melodrama, panoramas, ‘phantom rides’, and local actuality films (especially Mitchell and Kenyon’s Living Dublin series). Proto-cinematic devices – the Mutoscope and stereoscope – are also included in my analyses.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:39:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dirceu Antonio Scali Junior.pdf: 687751 bytes, checksum: f4197ea681f134a8c83cbee4c542a559 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-09-24 / The intention of this work is to look for to understand the relation author-workmanship from what if it could call originary creative gesture. For in such a way, it was initially looked to decide some questions concerning the relation personage and biography and, later, was carried through a biography of the mining writer João Guimarães Rosa, having tried to apprehend genesis of the phenomenon of the creation. To establish this analysis, some concepts developed for the French philosopher had been essential Maurice Merleau-Ponty, mainly the ones that in some way they send to the study of the work of art, as well as the referring questions to the research of this author on the language / A intenção desse trabalho é procurar entender a relação autor-obra a partir do que se poderia chamar de gesto criativo originário. Para tanto, procurou-se inicialmente resolver algumas questões acerca da relação personagem e biografia e, posteriormente, foi realizada uma biografia do escritor mineiro João Guimarães Rosa, tentando apreender a gênese do fenômeno da criação. Para estabelecer essa análise, foram essenciais alguns conceitos desenvolvidos pelo filósofo francês Maurice Merleau-Ponty, principalmente os que de alguma maneira remetem ao estudo da obra de arte, bem como às questões referentes à pesquisa desse autor sobre a linguagem

Claude Lefort est un penseur majeur du totalitarisme soviétique et un théoricien original de la démocratie ; mais cette pensée souffre d’être encore trop peu étudiée, et surtout peu comprise dans son articulation générale. Ce travail se propose de remédier à cette carence, et s’efforce, au travers d’une reconstruction des dimensions fondamentales de l’œuvre, de restituer à la pensée de l’auteur sa cohérence interne. Nous postulons ici que cette cohérence se dévoile à bien vouloir identifier le projet central de Claude Lefort, qui fut de penser les conditions de possibilité de la liberté politique, et partant, la démocratie comme un régime de la liberté. Un tel projet, d’abord envisagé dans le cadre de la théorie marxiste, va progressivement être réévalué à l’aide de la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, pour aboutir à une récusation des acceptions traditionnelles – telles que comprises en droit public – des notions de pouvoir et de liberté. Il s’agit alors pour Lefort de permettre la liberté politique, c’est ce que s’efforce de montrer la première partie. Il faut ensuite tirer les conséquences logiques d’une telle récusation. Elle amène à reconsidérer en profondeur la nature des deux termes : le pouvoir gagne une dimension « symbolique », et les libertés se pensent comme indissociablement individuelles et collectives. Cette construction se veut une manière spécifique d’organiser la liberté politique, c’est ce que s’emploie à révéler la seconde partie. / Claude Lefort is a major thinker of Soviet totalitarianism and an original theorist of democracy. However, his contributions remain much overlooked, and the overall coherence of his body of work is often misunderstood. This work aims to remedy this deficiency, and endeavours to identify and organize the fundamental dimensions of his thought, in order to re-establish its internal coherence. The hypothesis of this doctoral thesis is that this coherence is revealed through the identification of the central project of Claude Lefort, which was to apprehend the necessary conditions for the advent of political liberty, and therefore democracy as a “regime of liberty” (régime de la liberté). This intellectual project, developed first of all in the context of Marxist theory, was progressively reassessed in the light of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, eventually resulting in a rejection of the traditional understanding – that of public law – of the two concepts of power and liberty. The problem, for Lefort, is how to bring about the existence of political liberty ; which the first part of this work aims to demonstrate. It then becomes necessary to draw the logical consequences of such a rejection. It leads to a profound reconsideration of the nature of the two concepts : power gains a “symbolic” dimension, and liberties are inseparably thought as both collective and individual. Lefort’s construction must thus be understood as a specific way to organise political liberty ; as the second part of doctoral work attempts to reveal

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:25:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2005Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:53:31Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 vezali_pa_me_mar.pdf: 321938 bytes, checksum: fd99255e23e874cb8e1184e94615ccff (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Nesta dissertação nós mostraremos, pela contribuição da filosofia de Merleau-Ponty, focalizando o conceito de expressão e os processos de referenciação, que as relações entre linguagem, corpo e mundo da vida são formadoras do simbolismo e da significação. Em acréscimo, examinaremos alguns desenvolvimentos recentes das vertentes lingüísticas de uma perspectiva sócio-cognitiva da linguagem, refletindo sobre as conseqüências da afirmação da união senciente-sensível para a ontologia clássica da mente e da linguagem, como também para a teoria corrente do conhecimento e dos debates epistemológicos sobre a negação dos dualismos interno-externo, sujeito-objeto e mente-corpo. / In this dissertation we will show, through contribution of the philosophy Merleau-Ponty, focusing the conception of expression and the referention processes, however relations between language, body and life's world is formed the simbolism and the signification. In addition, we will examine some recent developments from the linguistics siope of a social-cognitive view of the language, reflecting upon the consequences of this assert of the unite perceive-perceptible to the classic ontogeny of mind and language, as well as to current theory of knowledge and espistemological debates about negation of the dualisms internal-external, subject-object, mind-body.

The Function of Speech in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty The submitted doctoral thesis is an attempt to describe the development of the intentional function of speech in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. The intentional function is defined as the change of expressed meaning that is engendered by the expression itself. We trace Husserl's position from the Logical Investigations and the first book of his Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, where he describes speech as the non- productive mirroring of other kinds of intentionality, to the late text The Origin of Geometry, where he discerns two functions of speech: it provides thought its ideality, which is different from the ideality of species; and it provides thought its objectivity, i.e. the form of object that lasts in history as identical. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty adopts Husserl's late position with several profound modifications. The starting-point ceases to be the linguistic sign, and speech becomes a kind of gesture. As a consequence, the difference between linguistic and non-linguistic ideality disappears. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty holds that the expression accomplishes the meaning of what it expresses. In this way, speech becomes creative and ceases to be just an empty intention of...

It is not uncommon to read claims of music’s ability to affect our sense of time and its rate of passage. Indeed, such effects are often considered among the most distinctive and prized aspects of musical aesthetics. Yet when it comes to the similarly abstract notion of space and its manipulation by musical structures, theorists are generally silent. My dissertation addresses this gap in the literature and shows how music’s spatial effects arise through an affective engagement with musical works. In this study, I examine an eclectic selection of compositions to determine how the spaces we inhabit are transformed by the music we hear within them. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodied perception, as well as research on acoustics, sound studies, and media theory, I deploy an affective model of spatial perception—a model that links the sense of space with the moment-to-moment needs and desires of the perceiver— to explain how these musical modulations of space occur. My claim is that the manner in which the music solicits our engagement affects how we respond, which in turn affects what we perceive. I begin by discussing the development of recording technology and how fixed media works deemed “spatial music” reinforce a particular conception of space as an empty container in which sound sources are arrayed in specific locations relative to a fixed listening position. After showing how innovative studio techniques have been used to unsettle this conventional spatial configuration, I then discuss examples of Renaissance vocal music, instrumental chamber music, and 20th century electronic music in order to develop a richer understanding of the range of spatial interactions that musical textures and timbres can provide. In my final chapter, I draw upon these varieties of affective engagement to construct a hermeneutic analysis of the spatial experience afforded by Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, thereby modeling a phenomenological method for grounding interpretation in embodied, rather than strictly discursive, practices. By soliciting movement through the call for bodily action, music allows us an opportunity to fit together one world of possibilities with another, thereby providing an occasion for grasping new meanings presented through the work. The spatial aspect of music, therefore, does not consist in merely recognizing an environmental setting populated by individual sound sources. Through the embodied practices of music perception and the malleability of space they reveal, we are afforded an opportunity to reshape our understanding of the world around us.

Les partisans de l’approche énactive soutiennent que la cognition se constitue à travers l’histoire des différentes formes d'interaction (biologique, sensorimotrice, intercorporelle, linguistique, etc.) entre un vivant et son environnement. Ces interactions ne sont pas aléatoires, mais des activités obéissant à certaines normes que les énactivistes appellent sense-making. La cognition est, de ce point de vue, une forme de sense-making. Malgré les avantages indéniables que confère une telle perspective pour étudier la cognition, la présente thèse développe un point de vue critique par rapport à l’approche énactive et soutient qu'il est nécessaire d'approfondir notre compréhension de la dimension écologique du sense-making. Le but principal de la thèse est en conséquence de montrer que l'environnement joue un rôle encore plus important que l’approche énactive ne lui attribue habituellement. En m'engageant de manière critique dans le répertoire conceptuel de la cognition énactive, de la phénoménologie et des approches écologiques de la cognition, l’objectif de cette thèse consiste à poser les bases conceptuelles d'une approche énactive-écologique de la cognition. Pour ce faire, la thèse s’attèle à mettre de l’avant trois idées principales. La première consiste à redéfinir le concept du sense-making : contrairement à la conception qui s’est traditionnellement imposée dans le mouvement énactif, nous allons démontrer qu’il s’agit d’un phénomène de développement (et non de création) de normes. La rencontre du corps et du monde est toujours ancrée dans un champ normatif prédéfini, de sorte que nous devons réévaluer le rôle que joue l'environnement dans les processus de sense-making. En effet, si les agents se retrouvent toujours-déjà plongés dans un champ normatif (et non dans un environnement purement causal et physique), il faut alors reconnaître que l'environnement joue un rôle actif dans la constitution et l'auto-transformation des normes de sense-making. La deuxième idée poursuit dans cette veine et porte sur cette nouvelle conception de l'environnement, qui est ici défini comme un champ normatif actif, incarnant une tension entre le passé habituel du système agent-environnement et les contingences incessantes des événements du monde qui poussent le système vers leur auto-transformation et développement. La troisième idée principale de cette thèse consiste en une description holistique du champ d'action des agents (un lieu énactif) et des normes édictées (enacted) par des processus de sense-making sur le terrain (normes de lieu). Une esquisse générale du lieu énactif montre que les activités de sense-making sont liées à des processus écologiques qui enchevêtrent de multiples agents et localités matérielles dans un réseau écologique local. Ces réseaux écologiques forment une unité systémique et résiliente qui se déploie dans le temps avec les habitants du lieu, et fonctionne comme un champ normatif qui contraint et motive l'auto-transformation de chaque système agent-environnement / Supporters of autonomist enactivism or the enactive approach claim that cognition is a phenomenon constituted by the historical development of different forms of interaction (biological, sensorimotor, intercorporeal, and linguistic) between living bodies and their environments. For autonomist enactivists, the nature of these interactions is not entirely predetermined by general laws of causation but by norms enacted in the historical path of the agent-environment system, and thanks to processes of sense-making. Cognition is, from the enactivist standpoint, a form of sense-making. While there are multiple advantages in holding such perspective to study mind and cognition, this thesis develops a critical point of view and argues that it is necessary to deepen our understanding of the ecological dimension of sense-making. Specifically, the thesis aims to show that the environment plays a more critical role than autonomist enactivism usually attributes to it. By drawing on and critically engaging with the conceptual repertoire of enactive cognition, phenomenology, and ecological approaches to cognition, my objective is to set the conceptual foundations for an enactive-ecological approach to cognition. For this task, I propose three interrelated ideas. The first redefines sense-making as a phenomenon of norm development. The most common descriptions of sense-making involve the emergence of meaning from raw physical matter thanks to the activity of living organisms. As norm development, by contrast, sense-making refers to a constant enactment and re-enactment of norms of interaction from other pregiven norms, previously enacted in the past of the agent-environment system. I argue that the encounter of the body and the world is permanently embedded in a pregiven normative field and never in an abstract void where raw physical interactions occur. From this standpoint, we need, however, to re-evaluate the role that the environment plays in sense-making processes. If agents find themselves immersed in normative fields and not in raw physical landscapes, then the environment has a more active role for the constitution and self-transformation of sense-making norms than autonomist enactivists have acknowledged. In this vein, the second main idea of this thesis concerns the environment as an active normative field that incarnates a tension between the habitual past of the agent-environment system and the ongoing contingencies of worldly events that push the system to their self-transformation and development. The third main idea of this thesis consists of a holistic description of the field of action of agents (enactive place) and the norms enacted by processes of sense-making in the field (place-norms). A general sketch of enactive place shows that sense-making is tied to processes that entangle multiple agents and material localities into a local ecological web. An enactive place constitutes a systemic and resilient unity that unfolds in time altogether with its inhabitants, working as a normative field that constrains and motivates the self-transformation of each agent-environment system. Bodies are therefore part of wider unities of historical development: places.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.