Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
The Website Against Philosophical Provincialism
Call for Contributions
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The Philosophy of Viagra
Published Rodopi in the "Philosophy of Sex and Love" series. Series editor: Adrianne McEvoy. Volume editor: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
The impotency remedy Viagra is the "fastest selling drug in history" (McGinn 1998). It is no longer just a medical phenomenon, but also a cultural icon, appearing in television sitcoms as a pretext for jokes or as a murder weapon. Viagra has socio-cultural implications not limited to sexuality, but concerns various parts of our cultural landscape. Being relatively convincing in terms of bio-medical efficiency, criticism of Viagra has so far mainly been expressed iin the (often feminist) "Liberal Arts" camp where Pfizer (the maker of Viagra) is reproached for its profit-oriented negation of any psychological, social, emotional, and relational components involved in impotency. Further criticism ridicules Viagra's mechanical imagery of a "techno-fix" (Vares & Braun 2006) not only intensifying the medicalization of impotency current since the early 1980s (Tiefer 1986), but also making "sex into a medical function like digestion" (Tiefer 2003) and the fact that Viagra renders masculinity as a mere problem of chemical engineering, plumbing, and hydraulics. A further concern is that through Viagra, the traditional gender role of the "potent man and the happy woman" is restored without any critical revision (Loe 2004). In spite of, or because of, the narrow humanistic basis offered by its producers, Viagra has obtained the status of a lifestyle drug.
It is clear that Viagra needs to be examined not only from a sociological but also from a philosophical point of view. Philosophers like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Irigay have been interested in exploring sexuality from points of view uninfluenced by theories constructed by scientists. The philosopher James Waddell has urged us to find "ways of thinking about sexuality that go beyond chemical, biological, and mechanical explanations. We need tools that are forged in the heat of erotic passion as it is lived to help us spot nonsense and to make sense of our own experience" (1997: 2). Does philosophy not know since Plato that scientific explanations, which claim to give an exhaustive account of erotic perception, are misleading?
So far, there are only relatively few serious philosophical attempts at tackling the Viagra phenomenon. Examples are "Deleuze on Viagra" by Annie Potts and Tiefer's "Doing the Viagra Tango" published by Radical Philosophy. Lee Quinby, in his essay on "Virile Reality" (1999), observes a "Viagra Effect" producing a viagrified reality, which is "mediated violence, clean war, and computer games."
What do philosophers have to say about the "viagrification" culture? Is there a philosophical principle behind Viagra as a cultural phenomenon?
Possible subjects are:
· Viagra and Posthumanism (artificial life)
· The Body as a Machine
· Reality and Desire
· Pursuing Hedonism. Why not?
· Non-natural sex?
· Ethical concerns about Viagra
· The Death of the Erotic ?
· Viagra and the Virtual. Through Viagra the desire is not created but has always been there in a virtual (that is, not actual but also not non-actual) form. Through Viagra the desire becomes (virtually) real.
· The self and the other in viagrified perception
· Male and female conceptions of sexuality in conflict
Send abstracts to thorstenbotz@hotmail.com. Deadline for abstracts: November 1 2009 (further extension possible). For articles: July 1 2010. We will confirm the receipt of your abstract in any case.
Conference CFP
This conference which was planned in Tuskegee had to be postponed. It might take place in 2011 in Barbados. Please check again.
Is Critical Regionalist Philosophy Possible?
Re-ethnicizing the Minds? Part II
In architecture, the concept of Critical Regionalism has gained popularity as a synthesis of universal, "modern" elements and individualistic elements derived from local cultures. Being introduced in the early 1980s by Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre, and Kenneth Frampton, the idea to produce buildings that are modern without neglecting contextual elements like scenery and historical references, has not only produced interesting architectural creations but also spawned a whole range of new theoretical reflections on alternatives to a universalist order or consumerist iconography that Critical Regionalists perceive as oppressive. Our own project from 2006, called Re-ethnicizing the Minds?, appears like one of such rare attempts, leading to an anthology of new articles by contributors from four different continents examining the philosophical possibilities of a critical engagement with one’s own particularity and its potential status within its respective philosophical traditions. In Re-ethnicizing the Minds? we stated that "talking about the 'ethnic' aspect of philosophy still contains a great deal of the challenge it had around the 1800’s: it still means reconciling enlightenment with regional tradition" (19). The present conference attempts to formulate the relationship between regionalism and philosophy in a different fashion: is it possible to retrospectively use the philosophical insights gained by architectural Critical Regionalism for a definition of the practice regionalism in contemporary philosophy?
We are looking for metaphilosophical contributions addressing possible conflicts between philosophy’s normative core concepts and its political, institutional, social and moral responses.
Critical Regionalist alternatives are more than a postmodern mix of ethno styles but integrate conceptual qualities like local light, perspective, and tectonic quality into a modern architectural framework. In order to "critically" root architectural works in their corresponding traditions, Critical Regionalists base their conceptual stances on careful studies of philosophers like; Kant, Ranke, Niebuhr, Humboldt, and others. It must appear as surprising that philosophy, the field from which architectural Critical Regionalism extracted its theoretical foundations, has never developed its own Critical Regionalist tradition. While philosophical evaluations of architecture and its rootedness in a regional context are thriving, few attempts have been made to apply the same kind of critical perception to regional elements in philosophy.
