Sesion Coordinator: Michael Bernard-Donals
English Department, University
of Wisconsin – Madison
Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison
WI 53706
mfbernarddon@wisc.edu
Doesn't the Other Always Win?: Lacan, Levinas, and the Precipitated Subject
Both Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas frame their discussions of the Other – and its founding of subjectivity – as traceable only within the limits of play, where the Other as Other is only discernable rhetorically through demonstrations of logical and ethical problems. Lacan's rendering of the three prisoner problem in his Ecrits found the very dialect of subjectivity that informs his later work. Similarly, Levinas' appeal to the ethical dilemmas articulated within and between the Talmud and its various commentaries likewise trace out a subject only supposed through the call of an Other, an Other that precedes the object of its call. This paper will offer a point of contact between what's often seen as two radically different approaches to the Other, showing how for both Lacan and Levinas the priority of the Other rests not in its spatial, geometric, or even logical prior existence to the subject, but rather in the subject's temporal dependence on the Other's movement.
Richard Glejzer
North Central College
riglejze@noctrl.edu
Language Games and the Discourse figure
This paper explores Lyotard's explanation of the differences between reading and seeing in Discours, figure (1971). In particular, it will explore the opposition of language to experience he sets up, one that looks like a Wittgensteinian ‘grammatical investigation.' avant la lettre, as all three references to Wittgenstein are to the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Focusing on Discours, figure also avoids the difficult hybridization of Wittgenstein with Kant (esp. in Just Gaming and The Differend ). The complication that arises in its place is the importance of psychoanalysis (esp. Freud) and phenomenology (esp. Merleau-Ponty); however, the latter's focus on the body allows an easier approach to the ‘forms of life' that support such a large part of the discussion of language-games in Philosophical Investigations and plays an important role in Wittgenstein studies.
Mark Pettus
University of Wisconsin, Madison
mapettus@wisc.edu
Persistence and Conviction: How to Say Yes in Beckett and Wittgenstein
In an essay entitled "The Exhausted" entirely devoted to the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, Gilles Deleuze writes, "Beckett's great contribution to logic is to have shown that exhaustion (exhaustivity) does not occur without a certain physiological exhaustion" (154). Hence it is not metaphorical to say that one becomes exhausted from exhausting logic; it is a symptomalogical fact. In this essay I will be concerned primarily with the Nietzschean question: what is the value of certainty? To go on, Beckett would respond. So too would Wittgenstein. To address and investigate this problem further, I will draw on Wittgenstein's arguments in On Certainty on the role that presuppositions play in our language games and his discussion in Philosophical Investigations of rule-following. I want to place Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Company beside Wittgenstein's texts in order to understand more fully the working out of the physiological effects of certainty on persistence and conviction. Finally, I wish to ask: can there be an ethics of persistence as Alain Badiou in his Ethics suggests? And can conviction lead to an affirmative attitude in the Nietzschean sense?
Andrew Taggart
University of Wisconsin, Madison
ajtaggart@wisc.edu