2. Abject Bodies in Society
First of all, there are countless different people in the world. Everyone has a different body shape, different eyes or skin color. Each individual is unique in its own way. Yet, there are some criteria existing which determine whether you fit in into social ideologies or not. First of all, it is important to underline and explain the existence and meaning of the abject itself. In her famous essay about the abject, Julia Kristeva QUELLE FEHLT comes across issues of how to actually define the abject, yet she says that she is “beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable [object]” (1). As mentioned above, the abject is not easy to define, as
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I could enumerate many examples of what I take to be the abjection of bodies. We can notice it, for instance, with the killing of Lebanese refugees: the way that those bodies, those lives, don’t get figured as lives. They can get counted, there’s outrage generally, but there is no specificity. […] [W]e get a kind of differential production of the human or differential materialization of the human. And we also get […] a [production] of the abject. So it is not, as if the unthinkable, the unlivable, the unintelligible has no discursive life; it [does] have one. (Meijer, Costera, and Prins 281).
All in all, Butler explains the situation our social concepts retain. An abject body does not necessarily need to be a disabled person and thus unable to be accepted as a normal living person. It goes beyond just suffering disability or other visual, physical “damages”. Being an abject body in our society means having a life which is not considered being one. Becoming a subject matter instead of an object or vice versa, just because of the way of life we are
What if life contributed to no meaning and the only point which matters is the existence happening during the present? To make things worse, as humans live, they breath, but as they die a salvation is received to their soul, and their existence is over. The Stranger by Albert Camus illustrates that the human soul exists in the world physically, therefore the presence or absence does not contribute to any particular event in life. Through, this thought the novel introduces Meursault, who alienates himself from society. He lacks concern for social conventions and is deprived of the physical bounding from people around him.
Conclusion: The mind is substantively different from the body and indeed matter in general. Because in this conception the mind is substantively distinct from the body it becomes plausible for us to doubt the intuitive connection between mind and body. Indeed there are many aspects of the external world that do not appear to have minds and yet appear none the less real in spite of this for example mountains, sticks or lamps, given this we can begin to rationalize that perhaps minds can exist without bodies, and we only lack the capacity to perceive them.
As Foucault writes in the Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison: “But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect
Through sociological perspective, we can view the society by the way it was set up and how it affects us. This paper consists of four different points or section that I saw in the movie that displays social issues and can be compared on how society works in real life. The first section in this paper discusses about the controlling administration which countenances the actions of a person. The second section which is euthanasia shows a system of emitting life when a society observed a single person as functionless. The third section explains how a family became a part of impersonal social group.
A feeling body “presents a challenge to the kind of Cartesian dualism that produces the body as a mere physical substance. The affective body is considered permeable to the ‘outside’ so that the very distinction between the inside and the outside as fixed and absolute is put into question” (Blackman, p. 10 : 2008). With that in mind, it is clear that the bodies of the women analysed in this essay, in many ways, are affected by their environmental stimuli – from Moss’ emulation of the addict “look” due to its positive responses attached to “coolness” to Winehouse’s troubled relationship with the media. It is important to note as well, that the body of any addict could be considered a feeling body due to its permeability to the way they are perceived in society (for example the contrast between a “functioning addict” and a “crackhead”). As stated by professor Alfred R. Lindesmith, “It has frequently been said that the drug user “cannot be cured if he doesn’t want to be cured”; but this appears to beg the question, for it is the very essence of addiction that the victim desires to use the drug - and also at \the same time desires to be free of it.”
This message of conformity and a homogenous appearance goes against the present-day beliefs that individuality and personal expression bring a positive element of variance into our day to day life. “We must cut out all that is different like a cancerous growth. It is essential to this society that we not only have a norm but that we conform to that norm. Differences weaken us. Variations destroy us.”
If the soul cannot possibly begin when a person does, when and where else could the event take place? However, Darrow 's argument is impaired by his incongruous application of the term soul. He mentions that the soul is popularly equated with identity, consciousness and memory, but fails to specify whether it is this notion or another that he uses. (42) Presuming, for the sake of moving forward, that it is this definition he himself adopts, it seems directly in conflict with his belief that the soul would exist outside of the physical body. (43) Darrow 's argument lacks a clear explication of his concept of the soul and, furthermore, it presents a confusing, contradictory account of the soul 's nature and
Men and women nowadays are starting to lose self-confidence in themselves and their body shape, which is negatively impacting the definition of how beauty and body shape are portrayed. “...97% of all women who had participated in a recent poll by Glamour magazine were self-deprecating about their body image at least once during their lives”(Lin 102). Studies have shown that women who occupy most of their time worrying about body image tend to have an eating disorder and distress which impairs the quality of life. Body image issues have recently started to become a problem in today’s society because of social media, magazines, and television.
If “existence precedes essence” in the case of human beings, then something comes out of nothing. An essence is
When we talk about race, gender, sexual orientation and class issues, we implied that something was not conformed to the norms. I feel it’s critical to understand the social norms people hold. It’s amazing that only human beings are capable of elaborate symbolic communication and of structuring their behavior in terms of abstract preferences that we have called values. Norms are the means through which values are expressed in behavior. Norms generally are the rules and regulations that groups live by.
One's existence, must come through thought, and thought works at its best when the mind is not troubled by sights or pleasures. For example, a hungry person won’t be able to focus on math when he is hungry or thinking of food. A person's being must have little as possible to do with the body as it tries to grasp wisdom or knowledge of reality. Therefore, since the body cannot perceive the Forms through eyes, ears or any bodily sense, one must try to perceive through the mind. From this one must conclude that, so long as we are in our bodies and the soul is mixed with evil, our desire for the truth will not be
Women’s Body The Figuration of the female body is well described in both Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El-Saadawi and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both novels show that the women bodies are not their own and controlled by others which it turned into an object in order to survive. In this paper, I would like to argue how the objectification of the female bodies in both novels resulted in their oppression and sufferings. Moreover, what is the definition of the figuration of a body to both Offred and Firdaus? And is there a way out to survive this tragedy in both novels?
When analyzing Kristeva’s essay on abjection one must first understand what abjection is (especially in terms of horror films). Abjection, from my understanding, is a mental state of deep and repulsing horror that one may experience when we see a rotting corpse, blood, or infected flesh or when a person commits crimes against children. And it is not just the existence of disgust in horror, but it is whole body, mental and physical suffering we encounter From what I understood Kristeva is attempting to delve into how abjection relates to horror, especially in a patriarchal society. Kristeva begins with what she calls a "phenomenological" examination of the abject. Kristeva uses her personal experience to try and give the reader a better understanding
Essay paper assignment II “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” This quote is largely a summarization of one of the core themes of the book, namely the inability to tell truly important things about something, a person for example, by just their looks. When the eye alone is used, it leads to a false or incomplete version of a person, the appearance but not the substance. The opposite of this quote, using appearance as a metric to determine the worth of a person, is the core drive behind racism and sexism, and one of the drives behind ethnocentric thought.
The human body is an amazing thing made up of many different parts. These parts are cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems. For starters, one type of cell makes up one type of tissue. Next, two or more types of tissues make an organ. Then, a few organs working together make an organ system.