Pedro Pennycook

I argue that Hegel's critique of the plastic ideal in Greek sculpture provides a negative model for embodied agency. Rather than rejecting embodiment, Hegel condemns Greek sculpture for its inability to express the human body in its effectiveness, i.e., its capacity to act. Thus, I situate Hegel's position on the "beautiful harmony" of the Greeks, in which sculpture embodies the limitations and contradictions of that way of life. This will allow me to read the distinct way in which plasticity will be incorporated into human and divine individualities as a diagnosis of a form of life. I conclude by stating how Hegel neither denies human nature nor abandons the embodied condition of Spirit, but finds the truth of corporeality in the organic activity of individual agents.

This essay examines the polysemy of ‘spielen’ in order to redirect the metaphorical talk of games as a critical tool against individualism, intellectualism, internalism, and representationalism in Modern philosophy. First, we revisit how neopragmatists have used chess to explain the public dimension of meaning. Though fruitful, we argue that this metaphor still bears intellectualist, elitists, and, more pressingly, overly mentalist assumptions. In the second section, we thus suggest football as a more accurate game-metaphor to express human know-how. For us, football better exhibits an enactive approach to cognition: rules acquire meaning by embodied acts, favouring improvisation and collective dynamics. Football thus shows ‘spielen’ as a self-regulated activity that emerges out of interaction with other embodied agents, institutions, and a rich environment. The third section draws on our metaphor to explore a threefold normative dimension of ‘spielen’ (biological, social, and moral), thus arguing for its better suitability to exemplify the organic, collective, and embedded realms that constitute embodied cognition.

Writers usually resort to bodily analogies when talking about their own practice. Particularly when we turn to modern literature, said analogies take up the task of expressing creative self-production, entangling textual and personhood exercises whereby a singular embodiment would arise from. In this essay, I shall suggest The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge may be read as Rilke’s version of that entanglement. I will do that by foremost comparing Malte’s and his most recurred hero in the novel, Baudelaire’s, poetic formation. My suggestion for The Notebooks peculiar model of self-creation lies in what I shall call its interauthorial dimension, i.e.: by playing with the double authorial function within the novel, Rilke transforms the failed attempts of his characters in the merits of his own personal formation as a poet. Highlighting that will allow me to relate the novel’s recurrent mentions to sensorial and bodily functions to what I take as its main trope, that is, a writer’s search for their own singularity.

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein suggests that doubting whether he “is a man” may exceed the limits of how our epistemic language-games function (§79). Since the certainty that things like “men” and “women” exist in the world is so deeply embedded in our world-picture (Weltbild) that it cannot be called into question, it might constitute a curious example of what the author calls a “hinge certainty”. However, the fact that our worldview is shaped by gender- related certainties should not be taken as immutable. In this paper, we argue that even if the gender binary can be considered a hinge certainty, this does not prevent it from being challenged and changed. To do so, we first contend that any interpretation of how hinges structure our epistemic language-games must prioritize at least one of the metaphors presented in On Certainty over the others. The selected metaphors would support either an anti-foundationalist or foundationalist epistemological reading. A foundationalist view of hinge certainties, we argue, is responsible for their supposed immutability, including gender- related hinge certainties. We then take the presumed immutability of gender certainties as a specific case study concerning the alleged immutability of hinge certainties. Here, we propose interpreting the gender binary as the foundation of our world-picture, whose “certainty” can be seen as a violent normative constraint. Through our anti-foundationalist reading of Wittgensteinian epistemology, we maintain that hinge certainties must be mutable, given their functional status — that is, their role or function should vary across different contexts. In defense of revising hinge certainties, we argue that our practices can serve as tools to challenge the hinge status of the gender binary.

This article aims to discuss psychoanalytic cure as a particular kind of health dispositive. I argue that, when psychoanalysts leave the critique of concepts such as healthiness, normality and cure behind, our praxis could perpetuate violent social values. Initially, I explore how our expectations of healthiness and normality are socially mediated through a return to the Freudian notion of “love and work”. Two sections are specifically dedicated to analyzing each of these figures, respectively. Such demonstration sustain itself in an approximation to the liberal concepts of work and love. My argument concludes with a critical appropriation of the Lacanian concepts of analytical act and sinthome, which I suggest could help us build a clinical praxis engaged with social emancipation. That opens room for a new, critically oriented reading of healthiness and cure.

I argue that Hegel’s concept of freedom requires the dissolution of dichotomies between history and nature. Ultimately, dissolving them would lead to an embodied concept of agency, whereby the singularity of each concrete organism finds normative expression within a free form of life. For that, I suggest that the dialectical thesis of speculative identity intertwines social critique with the critique of philosophical language. I shall call this procedure a “grammatical critique”, revealing Hegel’s shift to a vital normativity as its therapeutic moment. That will allow me to present the social pathologies of dualistic forms of life as a withholding of the fluidity of organic nature, instantiated in the body-mind split. I then turn to Adorno’s notion of “recording nature”, arguing that it fulfils the dialectical criteria for a free form of life, that is: one in which its agents are able to reflexively enact their vital normativity.

We usually don’t acknowledge social mediation when speaking about subjective experiences in day-to-day life, which relies instead on a unitary and essentialist notion of identity. I initially explore this statement by examining how Kant changes his view on singular-universal relation from the first to the third Critique. A closer look at the reflexive judgment and how it states singularity as a non-conceptualised event follows from that. I then argue in favour of an affinity between an aesthetic notion of singularity, such as found in the third Critique, and the political mobilisation of subjective experiences.