“Dwelling: Levinas beyond Heidegger”

“Dwelling: Levinas beyond Heidegger”

In his book Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas discusses the concept of dwelling directed polemically to Martin Heidegger. In this study I want to suggest that the source of Levinas's 'domesticity' may found in his Talmudic readings. His phenomenological research revealed 'dwelling' as an ethical thinking. The Levinasian thought sees Home that is not derived from the Freudian “angst” or from the Heideggerian “thrownness“ [geworfen]: "he does not find himself brutally cast forth and forsaken in the world”.

Levinas explains the ethical meaning of 'domesticity' by understanding the ethical aspect of the 'feminine': “in a world that offers it no inner refuge, in which it is disorientated, solitary and wondering… 'The house is woman' the Talmud tells us”. But the terms 'home' and 'domesticity' goes beyond the descriptive social usage of these terms, extending to the meaning of 'being in the world'. Levinas’s concept of feminine and dwelling runs deeper than that and indeed stands in contrast to Heidegger. Heidegger describes the situation of the Dasein’s being as 'thrown into the world', and the way of authenticity lies in accepting the facticity of it. And Levinas uses a difficult metaphor to describe this facticity, that of an actual projectile, as a 'stone one casts behind oneself'. Opposite the possibility of projectedness is “home-ness/dwelling”.

One possible perception of “home” would describe it as a person’s protected space, a deliberate turning away from the external and a gathering inward into one’s interior. And there is another possibility for understanding 'home', and he identifies it with 'the feminine'. The new meaning of dwelling is not as shelter but as ethical dwelling. Home that is domesticity intended to welcome, one that remains open in order to accept guests. Feminine offers an alternative in an alienated world, an alternative called 'home'. 'To feel at home' is not to feel protected but rather to feel that one is moving inward to a familiar place, a welcoming place. It is a motion of transition – not an outward one, though, but an inward one.

I propose to focus on the history of Amarnath as an important place of pilgrimage in India, along with how and why the issue of land transfer became an important political problem of the subcontinent with regard to communal space providing upper-hand to the separatist groups in and outside India. Much has been written on this issue, but there still remains considerable scope for reevaluation. I propose to make an effort to this end in my paper.

“Paradoxical Space and the Geopolitics of Race and Domestic Violence”

In 2010, Marissa Alexander, a black woman from Florida, fired a single gunshot upwards into a wall to halt an attack by her abusive husband. The shooting caused no injuries. Despite the fact that she acted in self-defense, Alexander was denied immunity from prosecution under Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law. In 2012, she was convicted sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison. In an interview, Alexander asked, "If you do everything to get on the right side of the law, and it's a law that does not apply to you, where do you go from there?"

Recent public debates about the racialized and gendered discrepancies of the application of “Stand Your Ground” (SYG) laws have created an opportunity for stronger spatialized analyses of domestic violence, particularly in the context of the criminalization of battered women who are disproportionately black women and other women of color. In this paper, I ask can a geopolitical analysis of domestic violence create a richer understanding of the criminalization of domestic violence survivors who act in self-defense?

The spatialized details of Alexander’s experience was the basis on which the court rejected her SYG defense. The presiding judge argued that Alexander could not have been “genuinely afraid” (an affective requirement of the law) because she failed to successfully escape her home after being attacked. State Prosecutor Angela Corey used Alexander’s movement across her home as evidence that, instead of feeling “afraid,” Alexander was actually “angry.” Corey writes, “a person who holds a genuine fear for their life would have escaped through a window in the master bedroom or from one of the multiple other exits to the home.” In a vivid depiction of the legal burden placed upon Alexander, she is expected to literally jump out of a window to effectively perform “fear.” Although the SYG statute states that, if you feel fear, you have the right to remain where you are and defend yourself, Corey argues the reverse: if you remain where you are, you must not be afraid. Corey effectively creates a logical contradiction that is impossible for Alexander to resolve.

In her book, Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Katherine McKittrick employs the concept of “paradoxical space” to describe the account of enslaved black woman, Harriet Jacob’s, long process of escape from slavery that involved hiding in a very small space just beneath the roof of a building for seven years. I argue that the concept of paradoxical space can also be applied to Alexander’s experience, particularly as it relates to the state’s rationalization of why she should be prosecuted. Alexander’s key, open-ended question, "Where do you go from there?" reveals the despair that lives in the impossibility of overcoming the state’s willful contradictions in its application of the law for black women. But the question is also provocative in that it challenges us to consider how the geographic politics of racialized gender violence defines the borders – the whereness -- of freedom, safety, and the right to exist.

In the last part of the paper, I relate the thesis enunciated to the Buddhist stupas and the potentials of representing śūnyatā or emptiness, where images, icons, deities, and gurus are all subverted in the proper spaces marked with No-thing/No-Self (neither ātman nor paramātma). What would a temple-work dedicated to the Postcolonial 'Non-God', Karl Jasper's 'Missing God' , Nietzsche's 'Death of God' , and Heidegger's finalé in 'Was ist Metaphysic?' – to Nothingness – be like? What would be their architectonic aesthetics and political ethics?

“Finding a Place for Transhumanist Immortality in Ancient Indian Philosophy”

Space metaphors in general and place metaphors in particular play a crucial role in the conceptualization, design and the discourses of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Marshall McLuhan consistently developed his theories and reflections on electronic media based on the increasing use of spatial metaphors (“galaxy” in 1962, “landscape” in 1969, and in 1989 the “Global Village”). According to Gow (2001), McLuhan put spatial metaphors at the center of his conceptualization of new media. Based on and inspired by his pioneering work and the resulting and widely adopted conceptual-metaphorical framework, the WWW further developed more productive spatial metaphors, and more precisely place metaphors for various user scenarios. In E-Learning and E-Science, for instance, we nowadays use “platforms”, “repositories”, virtual learning “rooms”, digital “libraries”, work “environments”, collaborative “laboratories” (or more concisely in the blending “collaboratories”, etc. as “places” where teachers and students, as well as scientists “meet” and work together.