Fantasy, Counter-fantasy, and Meta fantasy in Hobbes's and Butler's Accounts of Vulnerability

2020-06-01
Grıffıth, James Edmond Carr
Show full item record
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
261
views
0
downloads
Hobbes and Butler both conjure images of an abandoned infant in their respective discussions of vulnerability. Leviathan uses this image to discuss original dominion, or natural maternal right over the child, while for Butler rights discourse produces fantasies of invulnerability that derealize other lives. However, Hobbes's infant in nature has no rights and can only consent to being nourished. Only when able to nourish itself can it claim rights to transfer through the covenant producing a fantasy of individual invulnerability. Vulnerability in the state of nature and the commonwealth's fantasy of invulnerability are together a counter-fantasy to the fantasies of invulnerability of Hobbes's time, through heaven or eternal glory. In question is whether Butler in her reimagining of community, is, like Hobbes, producing a fantasy but a meta-fantasy that community can be taken as fantasy without derealizing the fantastic or that fantasizes an honesty about its being fantasy.
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/88703
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
Department of Philosophy, Article

Suggestions

Subjectivity and subject - object relations in Neil Gaiman: Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Odd and the Frost Giants and Fortunately, the Milk
Gültekin, Mert Gökçen; Birlik, Nurten; Department of English Literature (2022-12)
Neil Gaiman’s novels for children reveal threshold subjectivities and non-normative subject-object relations as they are about child characters who transgress the limitations of ‘the human’ by visiting or inhabiting out of the ordinary worlds. This thesis aims to suggest a new roadmap in reading Gaiman’s novels for children by discussing and digging into new hermeneutical layers. The thesis claims that Gaiman’s children’s fiction is enriched by these transgressive threshold subjectivities as they open the n...
Psychological bisexuality and otherness in the novels of angela carter, virginia woolf, marge piercy and ursula le guin : a study from the perspective of ecriture feminine
Pekşen Yanıkoğlu, Seda; İçöz, Nursel; Department of English Literature (2008)
This study analyses The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin from the perspective of écriture féminine. After a thorough discussion of the roots of écriture féminine, the theory of the French feminists is put into practice in the analysis of the novels. The study asserts that the concepts of bisexuality, the other and the voice are common elements in novels of écriture féminine, thereby the n...
Sociological imagination of Sigmund Freud: An attempt to locate Freudian psychoanalysis in social theory
Taş, Berke; Kuymulu, Mehmet Barış; Topal, Çağatay; Department of Sociology (2020-10)
This thesis investigates the sociological imagination of Sigmund Freud and the historicity of its formation considering the ongoing importance of psychoanalysis for social theory. As a first step in this endeavor, a conceptual framework is developed out of detecting the prevalent themes in the arguments of C. Wright Mills. Then, these themes are transformed into a methodological structure in terms of operationalizing them in connection to psychoanalytic concepts of Freud. This methodological structure is co...
Constructing and deconstructing chivalric romance and modern fantasy literature
Çankaya, Tuğçe; Alpakın Martınez Caro, Dürrin; Department of English Literature (2015)
Although generic, psychoanalytic and postcolonial approaches differ in nature, each of them might be helpful in revealing the strong affinity between chivalric romance and modern fantasy. In the light of generic analysis of these two genres, it is apparent that modern fantasy is the generic revival of the chivalric romance. Among these generic features, the quest motif, adventures to the other worlds, imaginary characters/settings and the battle between light and darkness, circular plot pattern and anachron...
Psychic spaces in three plays by Samuel Beckettthe abjected semiotic intruding in to the symbolic
DEMİR, Betül; Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M.; Department of English Literature (2021-3-04)
This thesis examines the intrusion of the abjected semiotic into the symbolic in Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Daysby Samuel Beckett. A survey of studies in drama finds that the recent spatial turn has largely ignored spaces of drama, and that the current state of spatial criticism alone cannot adequately explain spaces in the drama of Beckett. Spatial binarism and the imagery of death, being relevant in these plays, are used as the initial steps for investigating psychic spatialityin the drama of Be...
Citation Formats
J. E. C. Grıffıth, “Fantasy, Counter-fantasy, and Meta fantasy in Hobbes’s and Butler’s Accounts of Vulnerability,” PHILOSOPHY TODAY, pp. 617–636, 2020, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/88703.
METU IIS - Integrated Information Service open@metu.edu.tr