Tag Archives: body

New (Vital) Materialisms

Posted on October 23, 2015 by zjb

Reviewing my reading notes, I’m not sure what to say about the excellent edited volume, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. I’m looking at it as a sister, cross-over companion to Material Feminisms edited by … Continue reading →

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(Moshe Chayyim Luzzatto) Anthroposophy (The Way of God)

Posted on October 19, 2015 by zjb

For years on the ten days between Rosh Ha’Shanah and Yom Kippur, I read Moshe Chayyim Luzzatos’ classic ethical treatise, Path of the Just (Mesilat Ha’Yesharim). This year I picked up the Hebrew-English edition of The Way of God (Derekh … Continue reading →

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Poisons, Hemorrhoids, Cohabitation (Maimonides)

Posted on October 12, 2015 by zjb

Worldly and cosmopolitan, this is not the Maimonides I read in graduate school. His short medical writings were translated into English by Fred Rosner for the Maimonides Research Institute in Haifa back in the mid 1980s. For undoubtedly puerile reasons, … Continue reading →

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Bodies of God (Benjamin Sommer at Syracuse University)

Posted on October 7, 2015 by zjb
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Material Feminism & Jewish Aesthetic Thought (New Chapter)

Posted on October 2, 2015 by zjb

Needless to say, there has been little to zero recognition of these kinds of questions in Jewish philosophy about human viscera, affect, imagination, and the constitution and deconstitution of human subjectivities. The larger contexts to all this are woolly ideas in … Continue reading →

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God Would Have To Have A Body (Edmund Husserl) (Ideas II)

Posted on November 25, 2014 by zjb

Part one of Husserl’s Ideas II is given over to the phenomenological “constitution of material nature.” Of all places, it’s here that Husserl speculates about God and spirits as embodied, about the objectivity of a world saturated by subjectivity (95, … Continue reading →

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(Breathing) Him to Her After Deconstruction (Luce Irigaray Between East and West)

Posted on April 28, 2014 by zjb

Against the better judgment of colleagues and friends I assigned Luce Irigaray Between East and West for my graduate seminar on “Religion, Art, and Aesthetics.”This year, we were looking at bodies and images of the body, starting with Nietzsche’s The … Continue reading →

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Eye and Mind and Flesh (Merleau-Ponty)

Posted on February 26, 2014 by zjb

I just taught for the second time Merleau-Ponty’s two major essays on painting. The first one, “Cezanne’s Doubt” was written in 1945 and is typically seen as a complement to Merleau-Ponty’s completed opus from the same time, The Phenomenology of … Continue reading →

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Nietzsche Art Nouveau (Birth of Tragedy & Apollinian Bodies)

Posted on February 19, 2014 by zjb

Art Nouveau reminds me of Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. As an art movement, art nouveau belongs to that period at the fin de siècle very much under the influence of Lebensphilosophie and vitalism. The perfectly formed body stands … Continue reading →

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Jewish Thought, Feminist Theory, And Volatile Bodies (Elizabeth Grosz)

Posted on August 1, 2013 by zjb

Better late than never and with great pleasure, I just read Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (1994). It’s all part of my little summer Deleuze swerve. Her focus is on the body, or rather the relations between … Continue reading →

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