by Jeanne Willette | Sep 13, 2013 | Philosophy
POST-COLONIAL THEORY PART FOUR: THE SUBALTERN Can the Subaltern Speak? One can posit phases in Post-Colonial theory, moving across time from the post-war reaction against colonial rule in the fifties and the sixties, Albert Memmi (1920-), Aime Cesaire (1913-2008), and...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 6, 2013 | Philosophy
POST-COLONIAL THEORY PART THREE: EDWARD SAID (1935-2003) Orientalism Perhaps the most influential and widely read Post-Colonial critic was the late Edward Said (1935 – 2003) a Palestinian intellectual who was born in Jerusalem and died in exile in America. ...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 30, 2013 | Philosophy
POST-COLONIAL THEORY PART TWO: FRANTZ FANON Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth Since the voyages of Columbus, Europeans sought out the territories of the Other, claimed the dark skinned people for slaves, and exploited the resources of those alien...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 23, 2013 | Philosophy
POST-COLONIAL THEORY PART ONE: HISTORICAL CONTEXT Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized Just as Race is essentially an American phenomenon, Post-Colonial Theory is essentially a European phenomenon. While it is necessary to make a distinction between the very...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 16, 2013 | Philosophy
ÉCRITURE FEMININE PART THREE: THE TAIN OF THE MIRROR LUCE IRIGARAY (1930 – ) Women are outside all systems; they are stranded in the “eternal,” the “natural,” or the “essential.” Outside of history and beyond the reach of progress, women exist as the...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 9, 2013 | Theory
ÉCRITURE FEMININE PART TWO: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema LAURA MULVEY (1941 – ) One of the most famous essays critiquing the structures of masculine oppression comes not from France and not from America but from the genteel shores of the British Isles:...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 2, 2013 | Philosophy
ÉCRITURE FÉMININE PART ONE: AMERICA AND FRANCE …It still remains politically essential for feminists to defend women as women in order to contrast the patriarchal oppression that precisely defines women as women…Toril Moi, 1995 One is not born a woman, one...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 26, 2013 | Philosophy
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905-1980) EXISTENTIALISM “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm.” Existentialism set the tone for Postmodern thinking by being negative: it is defined in terms of what it is not and discards previous systems rooted in the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 19, 2013 | Theory
JACQUES LACAN (1901 – 1981) PART SIX: LACAN AND WOMEN Throughout this series on the teachings of Jacques Lacan, I have noted several times that his terms must not be taken literally. The Masculine Order does not signify “men” or “males,”...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 12, 2013 | Theory
JACQUES LACAN (1901 – 1981) PART FIVE: THE FORMATION OF THE SUBJECT Anyone who has read the writings of Jacques Lacan came to the humbling realization that in any meaningful way s/he simply didn’t exist. Having gone through the boot camp of the Oedipal...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 5, 2013 | Theory
JACQUES LACAN (1901 – 1981) PART FOUR: THE MIRROR STAGE, CONTINUED Although Jacques Lacan can be characterized as a philosopher because his life work was based on reinterpreting the canonical writings of a philosopher, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). However, Lacan...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 28, 2013 | Theory
JACQUES LACAN (1901 – 1981) PART THREE: THE MIRROR STAGE As the heir to early Modernist philosophy, Jacques Lacan sampled, in a pre-Postmodern fashion, a complex of philosophical ideas on how humans come into Being and how humans become socialized. Using...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 21, 2013 | Podcast, Postmodern
The Definition of Postmodernism Postmodernism was an international phenomenon, neither style nor movement, but a state of mind. An inversion of Modernism, Postmodernism was a philosophical discourse applied to painting which reconsidered the “languages” of...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 21, 2013 | Theory
JACQUES LACAN (1901 – 1981) PART TWO: RETURN TO FREUD Being a transitional figure, bridging Modernism and Postmodernism, Jacques Lacan was a complex and hybrid philosopher whose work is convoluted and complicated. As a Modernist, he favored models and...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 14, 2013 | Theory
JACQUES-MARIE ÉMILE LACAN (1901 – 1981) PART ONE: HISTORICAL CONTEXT Among the most important philosophers of the post-war period was Jacques Lacan who lectured to a number of future Postmodern thinkers, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva,...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 7, 2013 | Philosophy
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889-1951) Part Two: The Late Work Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the...
by Jeanne Willette | May 31, 2013 | Modern Culture, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889 – 1951) Part One: Early Work During the War to End all Wars, it would be the self-appointed task of an obscure Austrian philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein but bring Kantian philosophy to its logical conclusion. As biographer Edward...
by Jeanne Willette | May 24, 2013 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture, Modern Philosophy
ERWIN PANOFSKY AND ICONOGRAPHY Part Three: Icon, Iconography and Iconology As has often been pointed out, the exodus of Jewish scholars from Germany was one of the greatest brain drains of talent of the 20th or any other century. “Hitler shakes the trees, and I...
by Jeanne Willette | May 17, 2013 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Philosophy, Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
ERWIN PANOFSKY (1892-1968) Part Two: The System of Meaning: Art History as Symbolic Form Like the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky considered social acts to be not natural but linguistic forms, which are cultural, and thus subject to human...
by Jeanne Willette | May 17, 2013 | Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Podcasts, Contemporary Culture, Podcast, Postmodern
Georgia O’Keeffe, Part Four During the 1940s, Georgia O’Keeffe split her time between Taos and New York and while in the Southwest she was present at some remarkable little discussed events. Her home away from home, Ghost Ranch was the site where dinosaurs...
by Jeanne Willette | May 10, 2013 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture, Modern Philosophy
ERWIN PANOFSKY (1892-1968) Part One: The Antecedents of Iconography To be an art historian in Germany or Austria, the sites where the study of the discipline was both founded and developed, was to be a member of an intellectual elite. The study of art in the late...
by Jeanne Willette | May 3, 2013 | Modern Culture, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy
EDMUND HUSSERL (1859 – 1938) It is the dead date of Edmund Husserl that is of great interest. The fact that the philosopher died in the year 1938 speaks volumes of, not just his fate, but the history of the reception of his work. Like the philosophers of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 26, 2013 | Modern Culture, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy
THE LINGUISTIC TURN How do words mean? How is meaning constructed? These seemingly innocent questions are lethal to the entire edifice of knowledge. If we imagine knowledge, not as wisdom, but as an architecture of writing, then the foundation of “truth”...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 19, 2013 | Modern Culture, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy
SIGMUND FREUD (1856 – 1939) PART THREE REIFICATION AND FETISH The only access the psychoanalyst has to his or her patient is the words of that patient who undergoes the “talking cure.” Sigmund Freud believed in simply listening to and interpreting...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 19, 2013 | Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast, Postmodern
Georgia O’Keeffe, Part Three Liberated from the steel canyons of the skyscraper-lined avenues of New York City, Georgia O’Keeffe found “her country” in New Mexico. Here the painter found new vistas – the extraordinary landscapes of the...
