Aeschylus. The Persians. Prentice Hall, 1970.

Gruen, Erich S. “Rethinking the Other in Antiquity.” Princeton University Press eBooks, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400836550.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Penguin UK, 2016.

I would like to combine this week’s reading and the important psychoanalytic theory of the Other with the basic position I stated last week. Sans the tedious theoretical elaboration of the Mirror Stage, the conclusion is simple: one subject can only see himself from the Others’ eyes.

Irigaray, Luce. Sexes and Genealogies. 1993. pg9-21.

Very interesting article. The very act of the author questioning the legality of phallus is an act of patricide. The topic of contraception and abortion was a highly controversial subject in the United States of America in the 1980’s and to this day. In China, however, abortion has not been a taboo since ancient times. The Han Book, written in 105 A.D., records the use of medication for abortion by the ancient Chinese.

Shannon Li

Avital Ronell

GERM-UA 244

Nov. 23rd, 2023

Standing Over the Glass Bridge Above the World’s Rift

For psychopharmaceuticals, positivist psychology categorizes them: anxiolytics, empathogens, stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens. and these drugs, which are always chemically and electronically interfering with the brain’s natural way of functioning. The user of a drug usually expects a specific drug to work. Users of drugs usually expect that a particular drug will bring about a particular effect that will change the mental dilemma they are currently experiencing. This paper will combine psychotropic drugs and postmodernist writing to explore whether the world of hallucinations Walter Benjamin refers to is actually a gift from mother Nature.

Plato. Plato: Complete Works. Hackett Publishing, 1997. Phaedrus.

On my first day of seventh grade (freshman year of junior high school), I had a very childish argument with a kid wearing glasses about a stupid question. The main form of this argument was as follows: You’re stupid. Bounce back! Bounce is not valid! The rebound is valid, period! My IQ is twice yours, comma! My IQ is your absolute value! Of course, we could go on and on with this rhetorical question. However, when I first heard the concept of “absolute value,” I realized I couldn’t continue the argument. The reason was that I didn’t know what “absolute value” was, i.e., I had no signified in my head, and my whole language system went down for a few seconds. Perhaps in retrospect, we could have stacked that argument with concepts like “squaring,” but that would have implied some kind of rhetorical rift.

In Sophocles’ stories, God is always an extremely important object. He always appears as an inviolable figure. In the story of Oedipus, no matter how hard Oedipus and his own parents try, the prophecies of the gods are always fulfilled. This great burden is present in the form of fate. Oedipus comes to Tiresias to explain who is the contamination, and because Tiresias points out that Oedipus is the contamination, the two begin to quarrel over who is the “blind” (370-410). This reminds me of Lacan’s reference in a seminar of The Purloined Letter to three different kinds of people: “blind, seer and robber”; blind does not see, seer knows that blind does not see and pretends not to see, and robber sees what lies beneath the surface. Blind can’t see, seer knows blind can’t see and pretends he can’t see, and robber sees what lies beneath the surface.

Shannon Li

Avital Ronell

GERM-UA 244

Oct. 12nd, 2023

Beneath the Curtain, Above the Stage

The video game Umineko When They Cry is a storytelling parody of Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None. The story is about an extremely complex family drama and an isolated island murder case, and contains quite a lot of hardcore logical reasoning. One extremely important concept in that game is magic. Magic is the key to reasoning in the game, i.e. the purpose of the reasoning is that the existence of magic needs to be disproved in order to find the truth about the secret murder case. The focus of this paper is not to market the video game, but to explore the limits of semiotics as well as hermeneutics in terms of its concept of magic and the narrative devices that contain it.

Curd, Patricia. A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia. Hackett Publishing, 2011.

Astrology had a very important place in the theoretical system of these ancient philosophers. Their philosophical ideas, however, were in a state of infantile speculation about natural phenomena during the period of human civilization’s exploration of the unknown. Although it is said that the three Milesians were wrong about the world because basic chemistry and physics were not developed at that time, and even mathematics was in an embryonic stage. But that does not mean that there is nothing to learn from their ideas.

A story like this can be understood in many ways. It can be a conflict between natural law and man-made law, or a conflict between a positivist position and a non-positivist position on the same legal case. Antigone, in jurisprudential terms, stands for natural law, and Creon stands for man-made law. It seems that the story simply discusses the importance of natural law (morality). It seems to be a confrontation between morality and law. But Antigone’s story has a certain sublime value in it. The characters in the story have a very unusual emphasis on the definition of womanhood.