The Persistence of the Human

Consciousness Meta Body and Survival

in Contemporary Film and Literature 1st
Edition Matthew Escobar
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-persistence-of-the-human-consciousness-meta-b
ody-and-survival-in-contemporary-film-and-literature-1st-edition-matthew-escobar/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Language and Imagery of Coma and Brain Injury

Representations in Literature Film and Media 1st
Edition Matthew Colbeck

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-language-and-imagery-of-coma-
and-brain-injury-representations-in-literature-film-and-
media-1st-edition-matthew-colbeck/

Meta in Film and Television Series 1st Edition David

Roche

https://ebookmeta.com/product/meta-in-film-and-television-
series-1st-edition-david-roche/

Queer Muslim diasporas in contemporary literature and

film 1st Edition Alberto Fernández Carbajal

https://ebookmeta.com/product/queer-muslim-diasporas-in-
contemporary-literature-and-film-1st-edition-alberto-fernandez-
carbajal/

Carnivalizing Reconciliation Contemporary Australian

and Canadian Literature and Film beyond the Victim
Paradigm 1st Edition Hanna Teichler

https://ebookmeta.com/product/carnivalizing-reconciliation-
contemporary-australian-and-canadian-literature-and-film-beyond-
the-victim-paradigm-1st-edition-hanna-teichler/
The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film 1st
Edition Maria Beville

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-unnameable-monster-in-
literature-and-film-1st-edition-maria-beville/

Bible and Film The Basics 1st Edition Matthew S. Rindge

https://ebookmeta.com/product/bible-and-film-the-basics-1st-
edition-matthew-s-rindge/

Narratives of Place in Literature and Film 1st Edition

Steven Allen

https://ebookmeta.com/product/narratives-of-place-in-literature-
and-film-1st-edition-steven-allen/

The Human Body in Health and Illness 7th Edition

Barbara Herlihy

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-human-body-in-health-and-
illness-7th-edition-barbara-herlihy/

Fabricating the Body Effects of Obligation and Exchange

in Contemporary Discourse 1st Edition Sarah Himsel
Burcon

https://ebookmeta.com/product/fabricating-the-body-effects-of-
obligation-and-exchange-in-contemporary-discourse-1st-edition-
sarah-himsel-burcon/
The Persistence of the Human
Consciousness, Literature
and the Arts

General Editor

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe (University of Lincoln, uk)

Editorial Board

Anna Bonshek (Prana World Group, Australia)

Per Brask (University of Winnipeg, Canada)
John Danvers (University of Plymouth, uk)
Amy Ione (Diatrope Institute, Berkeley, usa)
Michael Mangan (Loughborough University, uk)
Jade Rosina McCutcheon (Melbourne University, Australia)
Gregory Tague (St Francis College, New York, usa)
Arthur Versluis (Michigan State University, usa)
Christopher Webster (Aberystwyth University, uk)
Ralph Yarrow (University of East Anglia, uk)

VOLUME 48

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cla

The Persistence of the Human
Consciousness, Meta-body and Survival
in Contemporary Film and Literature

By

Matthew Escobar

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: painting by Victoria Rivera-Cordero, 2016.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Escobar, Matthew, author.

Title: The persistence of the human : consciousness, meta-body and survival
in contemporary film and literature / by Matthew Escobar.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2016] | Series: Consciousness,
literature and the arts, issn 1573-2193 ; 48 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016029178 (print) | lccn 2016039214 (ebook) | isbn
9789004323629 (hardback : alk. paper) | isbn 9789004323674 (e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Identity (Psychology) in literature. | Identity (Psychology)
in motion pictures. | Self-perception in literature. | Self-perception in
motion pictures. | Human body in literature. | Human body in motion
pictures.
Classification: lcc PN56.I42 E783 2016 (print) | lcc PN56.I42 (ebook) | ddc
809/.93353--dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029178

Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online
in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open.

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

issn 1573-2193
isbn 978-90-04-32362-9 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-32367-4 (e-book)

Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and
Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite
910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For my parents, my wife and my children Luc and Emma

∵
Contents

Acknowledgements ix
List of Figures x

Introduction 1

1 The Human, Consciousness and Its Temporality 13

Humanism 14
Human Freedom 17
What Makes One Human? 18
Consciousness 21
Daniel Dennett on Consciousness: The Human as Virtual Machine 24
Temporality, Consciousness and Ethics 28
Immersion and Framing: The Experience of Film and Literature 31
Embodied Drafts 37

2 Testing the Human: Trauma, Memory and Consciousness 40

Trauma and the Temporality of the Self 51
Memento 55
The Spectral Past Self 64
Memory, Identity and Ethics 66
Rendering Pain Visible in Memento 72
Eliminate the Past, Control the Future 77

3 The Phantom Limb: Specters, Trauma, and Meta-body 81

Meta-body 82
The Body Artist 88
Projecting the Self into a Different Emptiness 96
Erasing the Self 98
You are Made out of Time 101
Recovering the Self 101
The Bird and the Strand of Hair 102
Sous le sable 104
Water 105
Time Lets Fall Its Drop 108
Meta-body in Sous le sable 112
Naissance des fantômes 115
viii Contents

4 Survival: Human and Posthuman 139

The Temporality of the Paralyzed Body 149
Starting with “I” 151
Correcting the Past 153
Destroying the Self to Save It 157
Posthuman Consciousness 162
Parfit on Transpersonal Survival 165
Postpersonal Identity 179
The Absent Machine 180
The Machine Speaks 185
Involuntary Immortality 189
The Recuperative Project 190
Self-possession 199

Conclusion 201
Pain and the Clean Slate 202
The Other Penetrating / Occupying the Self 204

Bibliography 209
Index 217
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my wife and colleague Victoria Rivera-Cordero for her
­unwavering support and for having read and commented on several drafts of
the manuscript. Many thanks go to my friend and colleague Jeffrey Gray for
having read the introduction and for offering his advice. My sincere thanks to
Professor Lynn A. Higgins for her insightful comments on an early draft of this
book.
List of Figures

1 Leonard in an anonymous motel room on the phone 60

2 Leonard’s tattooed body 72
3 Leonard holds a photo of his spectral past self 77
4 Marie stares straight ahead in the pool (from right) 106
5 Marie stares straight ahead in the pool (from behind) 106
6 Marie stares straight ahead in the pool (head-on) 107
7 Marie face up in bed staring at the ceiling 110
8 Three sets of hands on Marie’s ecstatic face 111
9 Marie’s shocked expression at the morgue 113
10 Jean-Do deep in his tethered diving suit 144
11 Jean-Do’s right eye is sewn up 146
12 Jean-Do’s hybrid meta-body (therapist and patient together) 151
13 Ramón’s meta-body (past and present) 159
Introduction

On 10 January 2012 as Alan Gilbert led the New York Philharmonic in the fourth
movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a sublime moment of near silence,
the concert was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of an iPhone’s ma-
rimba ring tone. Faced with the seemingly endless ringing, the conductor took
the unprecedented step of stopping the concert.1 Among emotional calls from
elegantly clad audience members to remove the offender and fine him, Gilbert
asked the perpetrator to turn off his phone – he was easily identified as he
was sitting front and center. When the slow-reacting spectator (later dubbed
“Patron x” by the New York Times) finally did stop the phone’s ringing, the
exasperated conductor inquired in a scolding tone “Is it going to go off again?”
The only response from the patron was to turn his head from left to right and
back signifying that it would not.
It was reported that no concert had ever been stopped in this manner in the
170 year history of the New York Philharmonic.2 In those years, an estimated
14,000 performances had taken place before it was deemed necessary to halt
one in this manner. As it turns out, again according to the New York Times who
interviewed the anonymous patron in question, this was no case of blatant
disregard for the solemnity of the hallowed Avery Fisher Hall,3 the celebrated
conductor or the great composer, rather this awkward moment resulted from
an understandable confusion. The hapless patron, described as being between
sixty and seventy years old and the ceo of two businesses as well as a twenty-
year subscriber to the orchestra, had just received a new cell phone at work the
day before and claimed to have no idea that phones had alarms – the ringing
was not a phone call but rather an alarm whose ring goes off even when the
phone is silenced and does not stop until the user switches it off. Barring an
undisclosed hearing disability, the fact that Patron x let his phone ring for sev-
eral minutes even after there had been loud calls to shut it off, demonstrates

1 As reported on the following blogs: Superconductor (http://super-conductor.blogspot.

com/2012/01/mahler-interrupted.html), thousandfold echo (http://thousandfoldecho.com/
2012/01/10/concertus-interruptus/), ArtsBeat Blog (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/
2012/01/11/new-york-philharmonic-interrupted-by-chimes-mahler-never-intended/).
See also, Wakin, Daniel “Ringing Finally Ended, but There’s No Button to Stop Shame” The
New York Times. 12 Jan. 2012. Web. 12 Jan 2012.
2 See the following efe dispatch, “Un móvil interrumpe por primera vez un concierto de la
Filarmónica de Nueva York” El País. 12 Jan 2012. Web. 12 Jan 2012.
3 Renamed David Geffen Hall in 2015.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004323674_002

2 Introduction

at the very least that he was not skilled in dealing with such technology.4 The
conductor later admitted to being shocked by the incident, especially by the
fact that the ring was allowed to go on for so long. After all, the ring ripped
the musicians and the audience from a sublime “very far away, spiritual place”5
in which they had been immersed. Needless to say, the wealthy patron was
deeply humiliated and repentant; he agreed to an interview on the condition
that his anonymity be protected.6
I open with this story because this minor, yet historic event is revelatory of
several points that this book explores. In a famed concert hall and at one of
the most transcendent moments of a highly celebrated symphony by a late Ro-
mantic composer, a cell phone alarm not only interrupted the music (in i­ tself
not a new occurrence) but continued for so long that the concert had to be
stopped. The audience, the musicians and the conductor who were immersed
in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which is known for its narrative power,7 reacted
with anger and dismay at the interruption. The composer’s work was fiercely
defended, as the patron’s castigation was resoundingly applauded.

4 “Actually, Patron X said he had no idea he was the culprit. He said his company replaced his
BlackBerry with an iPhone the day before the concert. He said he made sure to turn it off
before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would
sound even if the phone was in silent mode. ‘I didn’t even know phones came with alarms,’
the man said” (Wakin, nyt 12 Jan 2012, Web. 12 Jan 2012).
5 “Mr. Gilbert, in the interview, said: ‘It was so shocking what happened. You’re in this very far
away, spiritual place in the piece. It’s like being rudely awakened. All of us were stunned on
the stage.’” (Wakin, nyt ArtsBeat blog, 11 Jan 2012, Web. 11 Jan 2012).
6 “‘You can imagine how devastating it is to know you had a hand in that,’ said the man, who
described himself as a business executive between 60 and 70 who runs two companies.
‘It’s horrible, horrible.’ The man said he had not slept in two days.” (nyt, 12 Jan 2012, Web.
12 Jan 2012). This story, which began on the New York Times ArtsBeat blog was kicked up the
following day to the main online edition due to its international importance. It was immedi-
ately picked up by cnn and the leading Spanish daily El País as well as numerous other web
based news services.
7 “For [Anthony] Newcomb ‘the narrative quality of Mahler’s music comes most powerfully
from the intersection of formal paradigm, thematic recurrence and transformation, and…
plot archetype,’ which together produce a ‘quest paradigm’ characteristic of the Romantic
Bildungsroman” (Micznik, 196). Micznik in her extensive and detailed overview of narrative
theory and its applicability to music states the following: “Thus, the more numerous basic
materials in Mahler by comparison with Beethoven, the diversity of themes and motives and
their syntactic and semantic autonomy, as well as the heterogeneous juxtaposition of the
many worlds invoked (as opposed to the single world in the ‘Pastoral’), reinforce the degree
of narrativity in Mahler” (218).
Introduction 3

As I see it, this incident highlights in dramatic fashion both the power of
narrative immersion and the consequences of interrupting it – both of which
illustrate a central premise of the book: namely that despite decades of artistic
experiments (and omnipresent technological advances), contemporary read-
ers and spectators still seek the kind of narrative immersion that the embod-
ied mind craves. It is also my contention that recent narrative fiction and film
increasingly exploit, explore and thematize the embodied mind, revealing the
tenacity of a certain brand of humanism. The presence of narratively based
concepts of personal identity even in texts which explore posthuman possibili-
ties is strong proof that our basic understanding of what it means to be human
has, despite appearances, remained mostly unchanged. This is so even though
our perception of time has been greatly modified by the same technology
which both interrupts and allows for the reconfiguration of our experience of
time at a rate and a level of ease which, until recently, had never been possible.
Basing my views on a long line of philosophers and literary theorists such as
Paul Ricœur, Daniel Dennett and Francisco Varela, I maintain in this book that
narrative plays an essential role in the process of constituting and maintaining
a sense of self. It is narrative’s effect on the embodied mind which gives ­stories
such force. Narrative projects us into possible spaces (such as Mahler’s “far
away place”), shaping a temporary corporeality which I term the “meta-body,”
a hybrid shared by the lived body and an imagined corporeality. The meta-
body is a secondary embodiment that we inhabit for however long our narra-
tive immersion lasts – something which, in today’s world, may be a question
of milliseconds or hours. The more agreeable the meta-body is, the less happy
we are upon being abruptly removed from it, though the return is essential.
We want to be able to slip back and forth between this secondary embodiment
and that of our lived body; each move entails both forgetting and remembering
different subject positions (loss and recuperation being salient themes in the
works which highlight this process). The negotiation of the transfer between
these states is shaped by culture and technology and this is something which is
precisely in flux now as multiple, ephemeral, fragmented narrative immersion
experiences are created by the different screens we come into contact with.8

8 While David Rushkoff’s Present Shock (2014) argues that we are in a moment of “narrative
collapse” fueled by the excessive fragmentation and distraction different media afford us,
I would argue to the contrary that media overwhelm us with an excess of narrative and that
we are constantly encouraged to package and present our lives (re-present them) through
photography (the much reviled “selfies”), video and text in ways that, though they may re-
ject meta-narratives, are no less narrative. When a person posts a photo of him or herself
at a café, bar or in some exotic or impressive local (or in a banal one for that matter), he or
4 Introduction

The lived body is most often experienced as an apparently transparent tool,

mainly opaque and distracting when in pain, while narrative immersion of-
fers a different kind of corporeality, one that effaces the lived body. There is
real pleasure in being “transported” by narrative. Being torn from an agree-
able state of narrative immersion or meta-body and thrown back into the lived
body – because of the gap between the two – can be enough of a surprise in
itself to cause annoyance or even anger (as in the irate fracas caused by the
neophyte iPhone user discussed above, a reaction not uncommon in children
whose television show or video game has just been abruptly turned off).
The pleasure of the meta-body, found in an immersive reading, listening
or viewing experience lies precisely in “losing” oneself while retaining control
over when and how to “find oneself” again. This desire to slip at will between
“lived” and “meta” bodies is fulfilled not only by active immersion in the virtual
spaces of narrative works but also by building complex relations with other
beings and real spaces. This means that we also create extended versions of
the meta-body in the lived narrative which plays out in our relations with oth-
ers and in the real spaces we inhabit. The impairment or interruption of that
crucial capacity can be traumatic depending on its severity.
Having said this, in addition to the question of narrative embodiment, one
can see something else of interest to this study coming to the surface in the
January 2012 mini scandal at Avery Fisher Hall. The indignation at the concert’s
interruption is symptomatic of an ever stronger clash between two distinct,
yet overlapping categories of being: the human and the posthuman. Later,
I explore both humanism9 (in Chapter 1) and posthumanism10 (in Chapter 3)
in greater detail but for the time being let’s consider the following elements of
this conflict as they manifested themselves in the famed concert hall. On the
side of humanism there was an audience immersed in narrative music, prac-
ticing silent self-control and above all demonstrating admiration for the artis-
tic mastery of unique human artists (Gustav Mahler but also the orchestra and
its conductor). On the side of a growing posthuman reality, there was a smart-
phone (an extension or prosthesis of the mind with memory, communications,­

she asks us to accept a certain story they are telling about themselves. Far from deterring
or eliminating this tendency to narrate one’s life, to emplot and thus define it, smart-
phones have increased our ways of doing so and rendered such practices omnipresent.
9 I will provisionally define this term as the privileging of human values, capacities (especially
mental and emotional depth) and artistic production as the sign or proof of these capacities.
10 A multivalent term generally defined as the project to either extend or move beyond the
concept of human nature, or enhance basic human capacities through a melding with
technology. This term thus suggests either a step beyond the paradigm of the human or a
radical extension of the same.
Introduction 5

recording and command capabilities11) and the interruption of narrative im-

mersion by an electronic, unwanted noise. In sum, this was a case of the tech-
nology running the human rather than the other way around. When the silicon
controls the flesh so to speak, we are firmly in the realm of the posthuman.
I’d like to suggest that (for those of us who were not there) this constitutes a
particularly humorous, if innocuous, example of the collision between an ex-
alted humanism and what is viewed by many as the threat of the posthuman
to humanist values.12
The humanist paradigm which posits a singular, valued, rational human
defined by the possible (i.e. the free or liberal humanist subject), ideally
characterized by self-mastery, is a model which the posthuman paradigm chal-
lenges in several ways. I’d like to suggest that liberal humanism will not be
relinquished quietly – in fact its central tenets continue to inform nearly all
mainstream literature and cinema. Its persistence as a foundational paradigm
in the narratives that I examine in this book reveals that despite the fact that
billions of people have developed a need for constant connection to a network
which serves as an external appendage to our minds, we still cling fiercely to a

11 In his preface to Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind (2011) on the extended mind theory
I have just referred to, philosopher David Chalmers writes “A month ago, I bought an
iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It
has replaced part of my memory, storing phone numbers and addresses that I once would
have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires: I call up a memo with the names of my
favorite dishes […] The iPhone is part of my mind already” (ix). The book is a further ex-
ploration of the “extended mind” thesis as explicated in Clark’s and Chalmers’ article “The
Extended Mind” (1998). In this article the authors state: “We advocate a very different sort
of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driv-
ing cognitive processes” (10).
12 Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) takes a very funny jab at the discourse
surrounding “profound experiences of art” (as he calls them) in which the ironic narra-
tor/protagonist, a poet on a prestigious fellowship to do research in Madrid who is in-
capable of such experiences, witnesses one such experience in the Prado museum and
finds it horrifying. Seeing a man crying inconsolably while standing in front of Weyden’s
Descent from the Cross, the protagonist is amazed, worried even by the thought of the
other man’s possibly dangerous mental state. The art lover is presumably in a “far away,
spiritual place,” so immersed in the narrative surrounding Christ’s death, and affected by
the weeping mourners depicted in the painting that his lived body mimics the state of his
meta-body. This extreme portrait of immersion, though of course neither impossible nor
unheard of, is not what I refer to in this study as I conceive of the relation to narrative as
ideally one which allows greater freedom to enter and exit the state of immersion. Here,
I am not interested in an exalted state of admiration or transport via high art, but rather
the experience of the traumatic interruption of narrative identity.
6 Introduction

“liberal humanist” model which emphasizes each person’s status as a free, ra-
tional subject. I argue that this is so even for those theorists, novelists and film-
makers who argue that the self is a fiction and that our days as “natural born
humans” are numbered. In their works one sees both how closely the humanist
model is bound to consciousness and its workings as well as the effects of its
disruption on personal identity – as caused by trauma.
Increasingly, contemporary novelists and filmmakers alike are exploring the
complexity of embodied consciousness. The reason for this, I argue, is clearly
revealed by cognitive science, philosophy of mind and literary theory (all of
which have focused much more on embodied approaches in the last twenty
years): narrative emplotment creates a sensation of lived time which, despite
our faster paced, more fragmentary existences, remains crucial to our sense of
self.13 I maintain that the centrality of consciousness has not been abandoned
by narrative literature or film even when these works are set in self-­consciously
postmodern or posthuman contexts. If anything, its centrality has been in-
creasingly emphasized. The role of consciousness in narrative immersion, has
also become a focal point of narrative theory.
Narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan, whose pioneering work on narrative across
media is increasingly influential in the realm of narratology, explains in “Be-
yond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media” (2002) what she sees as
the role of narrative:

As a cognitive structure, narrative has such a grip on the mind that the
popular success of a genre or medium involving language is crucially de-
pendent on its ability to tell stories. It is because knowledge was encoded
as tales that it was effectively transmitted and remembered in oral soci-
eties; it is because of its narrative power that the novel emerged as the
dominant literary genre of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and it
is because it gave new narrative dimensions to the novel and to the the-
ater that cinema became ‘the art of the twentieth century.’ (582)

Because narrative is so crucial to cognitive development, my analysis

takes into account other areas in which cognitive science is now being used to

13 The power of narrative immersion does not require long-term immersion and concentra-
tion of the sort that the Mahler symphony encourages. Meta-fictional, modernist narra-
tives (which this study does not concentrate on) also produce – in their own way – by the
play upon the inner and the outer levels of the fictional world, a sense of spatio-temporal
situating of the self, which is key to narrative identity.
Introduction 7

investigate literature and film. For example, Theory of Mind,14 a field of philo-
sophical inquiry which has recently gained currency in literary studies uses
findings in cognitive science to show that developing a mental representation
of the contents of another person’s mind not only is characteristic of humans
but serves a crucial purpose in training the mind to interact successfully in
the social world. Theory of Mind (often referred to as ToM) may be seen as a
capability of consciousness. It is metacognition (thought about thought) in
the same way that each of us not only has thoughts and mental representa-
tions but is capable of mentally standing back from this creative and analytical
process to view it as from a distance. This play between distance and proximity,
self and other, sameness and difference, appears at several levels and under
different guises in this study, especially with respect to questions of temporal-
ity and the meta-body.
The Persistence of the Human examines literary and cinematic works that
focus on personal identity and human consciousness, taken in its widest sense
to mean the relations of the senses and the mind as embodied. Emphasis is
placed here upon characters who have undergone different types of crises and
who rely on the senses, the body, memory and the other (often a spouse) to
recuperate a lost or damaged sense of continuity and personal identity; this
is an effort which is sometimes explicitly expressed in the works examined as
a desire to retain one’s “humanity.” As I examine instances in which personal
identity is challenged and the question of “the human” arises, the narratives
I have selected often present situations of trauma focusing above all on the
process of rebuilding the self (or survival).
As part of the embodied mind approach, I also show how contemporary
literary and filmic works privilege pain as the mark of the human. In these nar-
ratives characters dream of a recuperative correction of past pain in ways that
suggest that despite the new instantiations in which the body and the human/
posthuman subject appear, traces of humanism remain vital.
Chapter 1, entitled “The Human, Consciousness and its Temporality” ex-
plores the theoretical underpinnings of humanism (concentrating on Tzvetan
Todorov’s “space of human beings and of them alone”), the human’s rapport
with the nonhuman (Stiegler’s “originary prostheticity,” a concept I extend to
the self’s vital connection to the other as “originary prosthetic”), and the em-
bodied consciousness proposed by Antonio Damasio and Francisco Varela.

14 Theory of Mind is also called Mindreading; this concept is defined by the Stanford Ency-
clopedia of Philosophy in the following manner: “Mindreading is the activity of attribut-
ing mental states to oneself and to others, and of predicting and explaining behavior on
the basis of those attributions.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imagination/#ImaMin.
8 Introduction

I argue here that not only must we accede to the key role of the body in per-
ception and cognition, but we also need to view the corporeal envelope as a
porous two-way cloth – which filters and categorizes the information that it
receives while adapting to the structures and images that it comes into contact
with. As my central argument relies upon the notion that the rapport between
the self and the world gains its coherence through the construction of a tem-
porally marked narrative, this chapter goes on to examine philosopher Daniel
Dennett’s “Multiple Drafts” model of the mind and his concept of the self as
“center of narrative gravity” which, despite his theory’s “computational” ap-
proach to mind, I integrate into my own embodied approach.
Having discussed the narrative structure of the self, I turn to Francisco
­Varela’s theories on the “temporal horizon” of consciousness (and his theory of
the self as “situated embodied agent”). I argue that the importance of temporal
positioning for the self cannot be overstated. Indeed, the theme of the self’s
temporality is key in nearly all the works discussed in this book.
Approaching consciousness as central to the human, and realizing its em-
bodied nature leads to the question of how to trace the borders of a self which,
though a trajectory not a thing, is constructed and changes according to met-
aphorically imagined limits. Here both the concepts of narrative immersion
and framing come into play. Marie-Laure Ryan’s writings on the active nature
of narrative immersion (the ability to step back and experience immersion on
two levels) and Christian Metz’s theory of photography as death both inform
my approach to the experience of reading and viewing film as well as what
I refer to as the meta-body.
Chapter 2, entitled “Testing the Human: Trauma, Memory and Conscious-
ness” begins with the analysis of memory, violence and the human in British
novelist Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow. Here an ironically detached narrator tells
in reverse the life of a Nazi doctor who dies after spending years living incog-
nito in the United States. The reversal of perspective as the reader follows the
protagonist’s story (and his multiple name changes) disrupts the interpretive
process and makes the atrocities of the Holocaust appear to be the only events
that “make sense” to the narrator who believes that the murders he sees in
reverse are magical acts of creation. Here, I argue that the narrator’s lack of
comprehension is linked to his lack of visceral engagement which allows him
to watch and comment on the events of the protagonist’s life as though from
the safe distance of a bird’s eye view.
The instability of memory and the role it plays in the cognitive processes
necessary to maintain a clear sense of self is explored as a central theme in
Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000). As in Time’s Arrow, here trauma is
crucial to the temporal structure of the self whose potential for modification
Introduction 9

appears in the visceral link between writing and the body as the main charac-
ter must tattoo crucial information about himself on his own body in order not
to forget it. Questions of access to the mind, self-mastery and the rapport be-
tween writing and the body dominate my discussion of this reversed narrative.
The viewer’s detective-like role in attempting to overcome the same confusion
the character feels is one that stimulates a different kind of viewing, highlight-
ing the mind’s drive to reconstruct a linear temporal trajectory from fragment-
ed or confused narrative elements. Nolan’s film is particularly fascinating as it
is not simply a reversed narrative. It intercuts scenes from a parallel narrative
on the same character (filmed in black and white) that run forward with those
scenes from the central, reversed narrative. In this way, Nolan highlights the
cognitive dissonance of a main character who is himself confused about his
identity and purpose in life while frustrating the viewer’s attempts to do the
same. As a result, the disorienting experience this film produces changes the
way we view film and ourselves. These first two works which present murder-
ers whose crimes are buried by self-ignorance argue that abuse of power and
violence are both justified and perpetuated through selective forgetting, yet
they also suggest that the inability to forget is equally disruptive. Indeed, it is
viewed as inhuman.
Seamlessly sliding into and out of the meta-body requires a skillful balance
between remembering and forgetting, one which is both fragile and ­potentially
problematic; yet, the inability to navigate such narrative immersion also com-
ports serious risks. The theme of the inability to forget as a traumatic and
­potentially dehumanizing state is recurrent in the narratives studied here. I sug-
gest that the omnipresent and increasingly powerful forms of external memory
(in the “cloud,” but also in smartphones, thumb drives and many other storage de-
vices) have both eroded the general state of the average person’s mnemonic abili-
ties and contributed to a feeling that one can no longer escape past foibles as in
pre-Internet days. While the enhanced memory capabilities are a boon in many
ways, they also make one’s past increasingly accessible in ways that can be dam-
aging (e.g. today employers regularly use internet searches to see what ­applicants
have done and others have posted about them). This link between technol-
ogy and the seemingly limitless extension of memory remains metaphorical in
most of these narratives; they come to the fore most explicitly in the posthuman
stories of Amenábar, Jones and Piglia which are explored at the end of this study.
In Chapter 3, entitled “The Phantom Limb: Specters, Trauma, and Meta-
body,” I examine how a spectral other appears as a palliative to traumatic loss.
Each of the first two works treated in this chapter presents a case of potentially
supernatural spectrality of an other as phantom limb generated as a means of
dealing with the loss of a loved one. In American novelist Don DeLillo’s The
10 Introduction

Body Artist (2001), a female performance artist who must deal with the sudden
loss of her husband perceives an apparently imaginary version of him who she
hopes will help her recover her sense of self. French director François Ozon’s
film entitled Sous le sable (Under the Sand, 2000) also deals with a woman’s
loss of her husband. Here the spectral nature of the husband, whom the pro-
tagonist’s mind continues to place in her home after his disappearance (and
probable death), is effaced by a naturalistic depiction of his ghostly presence.
As do many of the works studied here, this film makes a strong argument for
the key role of fiction in the very substance of the self, and its role in survival.
Having explored DeLillo’s novella and Ozon’s film, I turn to Marie Darrie-
ussecq, a French Basque writer who preceded these works with a novella ex-
ploring similar terrain though with a different – and in many ways more overt –
focus on cognition and the concept of the lost loved one as phantom limb.
Her second novel entitled Naissance des fantômes (My Phantom Husband,
1998) sets in motion the drama of a wife who must cope with the abrupt and
inexplicable disappearance of her husband. Mixing the fantastic genre with
that of a scientifically tinged cognitive realism, Darrieussecq creates a narra-
tive of Darwinian humanism15 which functions on two primary levels: the bio-
logical (both micro and macro) and the imaginative. That is, on the one hand
the scientific and, on the other, the poetic. Yet these levels also correspond to
those of the brain (body) and the mind. Darrieussecq’s use of metaphor mim-
ics the process by which the data of the body is turned into narrative by the
mind. For each of the female protagonists of the three works examined in this
chapter, the question will become whether they can see themselves as newly
autonomous after the loss of their spouse or whether their newly solitary iden-
tities will lock them in a stagnant temporality. In each instance, the temporal-
ity and the direction of the self are crucial.
After these three explorations of the tension between competing views of
the self as either autonomous or relational, I examine in depth the concept of
the meta-body. Building upon the concepts of the embodied mind, the rela-
tional self, narrative identity, immersion, Dennett’s theory of the self as “center
of narrative gravity” and Theory of Mind, I present the meta-body as a dynamic
which results from the interplay of one’s lived body, the images and spaces it
encounters and the trajectories it follows. The meta-body is at once tempo-
ral, directional and narrative (since narrative is our means of “feeling time”).
Though not coterminous with the self, the meta-body functions as a kind of

15 By this term I mean an approach that posits the difference between humans and animals
as one of degree not of kind and which emphasizes the similarities of human and animal
cognition.
Introduction 11

space for the self, one that remains in movement. It is modified each time we
project our selves into the difference between actually lived spaces and virtu-
ally lived spaces. It is enacted when we look into the face of the other whose
presence is crucial to our selves (with whom we make plans for the future and
share memories of the past) and when we plunge into virtual, cinematic or
textual space.
Chapter 4, entitled “Survival: Human and Posthuman,” examines the ques-
tion of the self’s reconstitution and survival from a different angle. The first
three works I discuss in this chapter present the question of personal identity
as it is challenged by physical paralysis. I begin with an extended analysis of
American painter and director Julian Schnabel’s film Le scaphandre et le papil-
lon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007) about a French tetraplegic’s human-
ist fight for survival through writing, followed by a brief discussion of Spanish/
Chilean writer/director Alejandro Amenábar’s controversial film Mar adentro
(The Sea Inside, 2004) about real-life tetraplegic euthanasia activist Ramón
Sampedro. I argue here that Schnabel’s reworking of the memoir (by Jean-
Dominique Bauby), on which his film is based, emphasizes a trajectory of recu-
peration that is characteristic of redemptive humanist narrative. Amenábar’s
film, I argue, also highlights humanist values, though here the main character
attains the objective of preserving his authentic self principally by destroying
his body rather than attempting to assure his survival through a work of art
(as in Schnabel’s film). In both cases, the theme of recuperation of a lost self
and its survival lead my study back to the definition of the human and toward
an analysis of posthuman survival.
This chapter then moves on to an examination of several other works which
all engage with the problem of posthuman survival from different generic and
ethical standpoints. After discussing the basic tenets of theorist N. Katherine
Hayles concerning the category of the posthuman (a term whose meaning re-
mains in flux – Cary Wolfe’s reading of it, which I also discuss briefly, differs
greatly from that of Hayles) I turn to three films and a final novel, all of which
present a future world where cloning, computer simulated dreams, and life
extension (and suspension) are possible. Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (Open Your
Eyes, 1997) tells a story of survival by downloading the brain’s contents into an
advanced computer. The ethical choice that the main character is faced with at
the end of the film (either to become an embodied human again or to remain
in the virtual world of the computer) is explored as emblematic of the dilem-
mas that the posthuman forces us to confront.
Spanish writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s Cronocrímenes (Time Crimes,
2007) places the problem of posthuman survival somewhere between horror
and science fiction – positing the problem of multiple, cloned selves coexisting­
12 Introduction

and the macabre solution each avatar comes to. British director Duncan Jones’
Moon (2010) presents a different solution to this dilemma for personal identity.
When cloning becomes a reality for these protagonists, the question becomes
how personal identity may be defined and preserved as well as whether it should
be preserved. I examine these films in light of British philosopher Derek Parfit’s
“reductionist” concept of personal identity (which states that personal iden-
tity may be “impersonally described”), arguing that Jones’ Moon is the most
radical work in the study as it best presents the possibility of transpersonal
survival. Finally, this chapter takes an extended look at Argentinean novelist
Ricardo Piglia’s novel La ciudad ausente (The Absent City, 1992) and the ways in
which he explores what posthuman survival looks like when it is imagined as
a disembodied networked consciousness. This text, whose political resonance
and narrative innovation make it one of the most significant post-dictatorship
novels to come out of Argentina, equates posthuman survival with suffering,
loss of self and the search for authenticity (in the form of a lost original lan-
guage). Here I argue that the liberal humanist paradigm (of the autonomous
self), which most critics see the text abandoning is ironically reinscribed by
the recuperative project to extend the life of the central character called “La
máquina” (the machine), which consists of a recording and broadcasting de-
vice stocked with the memories of a woman whose husband could not bear the
thought of her untimely death.
The reasoning behind this study’s title The Persistence of the Human should
now be clear. I chose this expression to highlight two central aspects of the rep-
resentation of consciousness and personal identity in contemporary film and
literature (not just as a nod to Dalí’s “Persistence of Memory” or Bergson’s du-
rée). First, persistence is meant to emphasize the temporal aspect both of the
concept of the human (as a narratively constructed, unfolding, self-aware be-
ing) and secondly, the continued presence of the humanist paradigm in both
humanist and posthumanist narrative. In the final section of this book I argue
then that in many posthuman narratives the human remains a key principle
even if only as a nostalgic longing for the anticipated loss of humanity in the
coming posthuman era.16

16 By “posthuman era” I refer to the increasingly tight mesh between flesh and technology
by which human capabilities (both physical and mental) are being transformed and ex-
tended as well as the attendant philosophical questions regarding probable changes in
personal identity.
 chapter 1

The Human, Consciousness and Its Temporality

As philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues in Technics and Time, the human arises
and constitutes itself through its appropriation and transformation of “orga-
nized inorganic matter.” If with paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan, upon whose
work Stiegler bases much of his analysis, we view the emergence of human so-
ciety progressively in accord with its increasingly sophisticated usage of tech-
nics, we easily see how each shapes the other while the Rousseauist “natural
man” shorn from its reciprocal technical transformation of the world falls away
as an illusion. This interdependent relationship between the human and the
technical is what Stiegler calls “originary prostheticity.” The fact that the hu-
man is defined precisely by its relation to the virtual and the prosthetic tends
to blur the dividing lines between the “natural self” and the “technological self”
to which some humanists have been opposed – especially in its currently fe-
tishized forms.1 At the heart of this argument on the construction of the hu-
man is an image of the self as porous and dependent on reciprocal support
that is internalized to such an extent that this reciprocity defines the self.
As we will see in our discussion of cognitive science and philosophy of
mind’s approach to the self as floating subject position in need of temporal,
spatial and affective markers to situate itself, there can be no self without a
working through of the movement between self and other (both nonhuman
and human). But this is normally a transparent or invisible process, one which
we are not aware of, such that when the other’s radical change or absence
makes the necessity of this rapport clear, the self attempts to replace, recon-
struct, or somehow return to this changed or missing other. This sense of loss
of the newly discovered other in the self, the other as self (and the “self as
other” as Paul Ricœur convincingly argues in Oneself as Another) is what trig-
gers the classic humanist move to recuperate a past state which appears as
somehow more authentic than the present one.
Thus the view of the relationship between the human and what lies ­beyond
it may be applied to the process by which the self’s narrative ­relies on an ­other

1 For a powerful rebuttal to those (specifically Jean Baudrillard) whom Vivian Sobchack sees as
glamorizing the technologized, posthuman body – a model to which she opposes the natural
body capable of feeling pain – see “Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out
of the Century Alive” in Sobchack (2004).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004323674_003

14 chapter 1

as “prosthetic”2 a crucial rapport by which the self is both invested by and

invests the mental representation of a vital other. As Ángel Loureiro writes in
the preface to his Levinassian study The Ethics of Autobiography “There is no
self without an other who listens constantly, even in the midst of the deepest
silence or the greatest solitude” (xvi). I explore this concept in greater detail
in my discussion of the prosthetic other in Chapter 2. For now, I would like to
emphasize that taking embodied consciousness as the motor of the sense of self
has several consequences, especially when the self is viewed as f­ undamentally
relational. This is apparent in the basic struggle present in much of contempo-
rary literature and film between a desire to see the self as autonomous and the
realization that it is relational.
I turn now to a brief discussion of some of the concepts that historically
have helped define the notion of the human and the attendant ideology of
humanism.

Humanism

There are many brands of humanism, a term which is notoriously difficult to

define,3 but which, in its various incarnations, generally holds subjective hu-
man experience (and especially consciousness or the mind) as central, while

2 For the uses and misuses of the metaphor of the prosthetic see Smith and Morra eds. (2006).
See in particular Vivian Sobchack’s chapter entitled “A Leg to Stand On” where she decries
the usage of this metaphor where it implies a pleasurable and powerful relationship between
the human and nonhuman: “the scandal of the metaphor is that it has become a fetishized
and ‘unfleshed-out’ catchword that functions vaguely as the ungrounded and ‘floating sig-
nifier’ for a broad and variegated critical discourse on technoculture that includes little of
these prosthetic realities” (21). In defense of my own usage of the metaphor (following that
of Stiegler) I would say that it adheres to Sobchack’s description of the phenomenological
experience of an actual prosthesis (her own): “in most situations, the prosthetic as lived in
use is usually transparent; that is, it is as ‘absent’ (to use Drew Leder’s term) as is the rest of
our body when we’re focused outward to the world and successfully engaged in the various
projects of our daily life” (22). In the sense that Sobchack suggests that an actual prosthesis
should be considered “incorporated not ‘into’ or ‘on’ but ‘as’ the subject” (22), I suggest here
that the mutual investing of self and other is a normally transparent, integrated experience
which becomes opaque (i.e. visible) in moments of crisis when a disruption of the self’s nar-
rative trajectory points either to its absence or radical change. I would argue that this usage
is free of the “techofetishism” that Sobchack rightly criticizes.
3 In Humanism (1997), Tony Davies states that “It [humanism] is one of those words, like ‘re-
alism’ or ‘socialism,’ whose range of possible uses runs from the pedantically exact to the
cosmically vague. Like them, too, it carries, even in the most neutrally descriptive contexts,
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 15

conferring the greatest importance upon human dignity and potential. Some
of the most influential forms that humanism has taken include Christian hu-
manism (in which all humans derive their value from their origin as creatures
of God, with Christ as the model of the “perfect man”), socialist humanism
(which posits that by eliminating class divisions each person may benefit
and be protected equally in society), liberal humanism (the free subject who
owns herself and whose stable identity and agency are defined by a rational
mind) and secular humanism (which defends the essential value of human
life without reference to a divine origin). These last two models which overlap
and which I will refer to interchangeably as humanism and liberal humanism,
propose essentially an optimistic view that human rationality will ultimately
afford the answers to the key questions of our society. Because it posits, implic-
itly or explicitly, an essence to “the human” which must be protected, human-
ism, in its many forms, has opened itself up to the same criticisms as other
universal concepts (such as Classical Liberalism and Marxism).
Theorists and philosophers regularly defend some form of humanism (be it
secular, scientific or other) in an attempt to build a moral system based upon
the philosophy that human life and society are inherently worth preserving
and perpetuating indefinitely. Tzvetan Todorov and Kwame Anthony Appiah
constitute two prominent examples of thinkers who have recently defended
their own brands of humanism. To this list one might add Edward Said and
Amin Maalouf among many others.4 Poststructuralist philosophers such as
Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard have all ques-
tioned the assumptions of this humanism while insisting upon its discursive
status.5
In The Imperfect Garden, Todorov begins with a wide-ranging discussion of
what he sees as the foundations of humanism and liberal humanism (as a pil-
lar of the liberal democratic state):6

powerful connotations, positive or negative, of ideological allegiance, its very imprecision

making it all the more serviceable as a shibboleth of approval or deprecation” (3).
4 See Todorov (1993/1989, 2002/1989) and Appiah (2005). To this list one might also add essayist
and novelist Amin Maalouf’s In the Name of Identity (2001), which posits the need for a “dual
identity” based on multiple belongings so as to avoid the deadly consequences of national-
ism and ethnocentrism. See also Said (2003).
5 See for example Foucault (1973), Derrida (1982) and Lyotard (1991).
6 Hans Bertens summarizes in a succinct way the general components of “liberal humanism”
which he calls a “philosophical/political cluster of ideas in which the ultimate autonomy
and self-sufficiency of the subject are taken for granted” (6). Here is how Bertens defines the
term: “Liberal humanism assumes that all of us are essentially free and that we have at least
to some extent created ourselves on the basis of our individual experiences. […] Because of
16 chapter 1

The word humanist has at least three quite distinct, if significantly re-
lated, meanings. The oldest, imposed by the Renaissance, corresponds
to people who devote themselves to the study of the humanities, in par-
ticular to history and the literature of Greek and Latin antiquity; hence
they valorize this study or its subject. The most recent is a purely affective
meaning: “humanists” are those who behave humanely toward others or
who tell us that we must treat human beings decently; in short, they are
philanthropists. But I am using the word in neither its historical nor its
moral sense; I am using it to designate a doctrine that grants the human
being a particular role. Just what is this role? It consists, first of all, of
initiating one’s own acts (or some portion of them), of being free to ac-
complish them or not – therefore of being able to act at one’s will. The
distinctive feature of modernity is constitutive of humanism: man also
(and not only nature or God) decides his fate. In addition, it implies that
the ultimate end of these acts is a human being, not suprahuman entities
(God, goodness, justice) or infrahuman ones (pleasures, money, power).
Humanism, finally, marks out the space in which the agents of these acts
evolve: the space of all human beings, and of them alone. (Todorov 29)

Note here the distinction that Todorov draws between the suprahuman and the
infrahuman, a distinction which relies implicitly on a certain view of what con-
stitutes a “natural human.” He also attributes to humans a “particular role” which
elevates and specifically separates them from the rest of the animal kingdom (as
they occupy an exceptional “space of all human beings, and of them alone”).
This hierarchy (infrahuman, human, suprahuman) assumes that the truly hu-
man exists exclusively outside the other two categories, that it can be “purified”
of them (in short, this is a moral “human” who is, in particular, free from base
desires and who enjoys an effective agency “being able to act at one’s will”).
Yet, “the human” must be thought in its relationships not only in the social
sphere but also in the technical and artistic spheres whereby exteriorization (in
Stiegler’s terms) and projection of sentience (in Elaine Scarry’s terms) estab-
lish mutual ties of embodied influence. This means that “external” influences­

that freedom, we ourselves are supposedly the source of the value and the meaning we at-
tach to things. As liberal subjects we are not the sum of our experiences but can somehow
stand outside experience: we are not defined by our circumstances but are what we are be-
cause our ‘self’ has been there all along and has, moreover, remained remarkably inviolate
and stable” (6).
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 17

and “infrahuman” (or “superhuman”) desires can never be truly separated from
the human as they shape it constantly. As we will see, these mutual ties are
played out in artistic production and reception in the act of immersion in nar-
rative embodiment. This embodiment, which I examine under the concept
of the “meta-body,” is – much like the human itself – a hybrid that brings into
play the lived body, the imagined body (including how it interacts with other
bodies and the world) and their temporality. The “human” (understood as the
core of what makes one human which humanism defends and “posthuman-
ism” is often feared to do violence to) is not an easily separable, isolatable
“natural” core.

Human Freedom

According to Todorov, whose recuperative project aims to save humanism

from the misdeeds of universalist thought, the exaltation of human freedom
at the heart of humanism does not necessarily lead to the abuses with which
history is replete:

one of the most famous formulas connected to the origin of human-

ism, Descartes’ promise to “make ourselves [like] the lords and masters
of nature” (Discourse on the Method, pt. vi, Philosophical Writings, i,
pp. 142–143), refers less to humanist doctrine itself than to this prideful
perversion: Humanists affirm that man is not nature’s slave, not that na-
ture must become his slave. This Cartesian promise, which is located in
the tradition of Ficino or of Francis Bacon, belongs rather to the tradi-
tion of the scientistic family. Humanists do not claim the omnipotence of
man but deny the omnipotence of God or nature; they claim that along-
side the given there is a place, and a considerable place, for the chosen.
Nor are we to conclude that the possibility of intervening in our fate leads
inevitably to an infatuation with utopias, the desire to build paradise on
earth – which, as we know from the experience of the twentieth century,
is more likely to resemble hell. The utopian temptation is more closely
related to scientism than to humanism; it rests on the conviction that
total mastery of historical processes is possible – which contradicts the
hypothesis of liberty. By affirming the role of liberty in man, the human-
ists know that he can use it in the service of good – but also of evil. The
construction of a city in which evil would be excluded plays no part in the
humanist project. (37)
18 chapter 1

Thus, for Todorov, human freedom does not necessarily imply a desire for total
mastery, and in fact is opposed to it since one person or group’s total mastery
signifies the loss of what is centrally human for another (freedom). This is a
brand of ethical humanism that is centered on the principle that one’s liberty
ends where another’s begins.7 Let us note, however, that liberal humanism ex-
alts art as the sign of the inner depth and freedom of a conscious, unified self
(often referred to as the “liberal humanist subject”). This view carries with it
assumptions concerning the stability of the “inner self” and personal identity
which are bound up with the notion of conscious autonomy – an ability to act
in the world which, while not necessarily leading to attempts to control others,
nonetheless posits a separation of self and other which can be used to justify
the same.

What Makes One Human?

Elaine Scarry’s influential work The Body in Pain traces the history of human
creation as a series of projections. Scarry maintains that art is valued essen-
tially because it is seen as the embodiment or receptacle for the projection of
the “sentience” of the human subject who made it. The sentience projected
reflects a subjectivity inherent in consciousness. This disembodying tendency
in human creation (which Scarry follows in the move from “weapon” to “tool”
to “object” to “commodity” to “capital,” each being further detached from the
embodiment of the previous element) reflects a desire to express, capture and
protect what is viewed as the core of humanity within the self. The desire for
survival is carried forth upon the strength of a hopeful belief in human per-
fectibility (the ability to both master the self and assure its survival – or its
downfall – as famously formulated by Rousseau, whose vision of this faculty
was highly ambivalent).8

7 The same basic principle that John Stuart Mill states in Chapter 1 of On Liberty: “The only
freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long
as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it” (28).
8 The neologism “perfectibilité” first appeared in Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fonde-
ments de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755) as what distinguishes “civilized” humans from an-
imals: “Mais, quand les difficultés qui environnent toutes ces questions laisseraient quelque
lieu de disputer sur cette différence de l’homme et de l’animal, il y a une autre qualité très
spécifique qui les distingue, et sur laquelle il ne peut y avoir de contestation: c’est la faculté de
se perfectionner, faculté qui, à l’aide des circonstances, développe successivement toutes les
autres, et réside parmi nous tant dans l’espèce que dans l’individu; au lieu qu’un animal est au
bout de quelques mois ce qu’il sera toute sa vie, et son espèce au bout de mille ans ce qu’elle
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 19

Current “posthumanist” movements can be closely linked to this strain in

the humanist tradition first because they deepen the already fundamental
relationship between the human and the nonhuman (technics) and because
they represent the (radical) extension of the original project of human per-
fectibility (by which scientific and social efforts are harnessed ostensibly to
“perfect” and extend human capacities). The notion of perfectibility, as Rous-
seau sees it, itself points to what is widely agreed to be a fundamental human
characteristic: that of potential.
Cognitive science has attributed this potential for adaptation to the capac-
ity of the human brain to make new neuronal connections (neuroplasticity).
But this very adaptability of the brain also supports other faculties (such as
empathy) that art and politics celebrate as distinctively human. Coupling em-
pathy as one of the exalted capabilities of the human mind with the basic hu-
manist tenet that human life must be preserved demonstrates the centrality of
a certain ethics to humanist thought. Yet, it is not only the brain’s strengths but
its potential fragility, as psychology and cognitive science have shown, which
is an essentially human feature. The brain’s neuronal complexity, at the heart
of our capacity for metaphor, both vastly increases our cognitive abilities (for
example to see the world as possibility and thus material for fiction and inno-
vation) and opens us up to psychological attacks that the “lower” animals are
immune to. Thus, “the human” may be defined as much by its strengths and
potential as by its characteristic limits. Yet it can be argued (as it has been by
Michel Foucault and more recently by N. Katherine Hayles among others) that
the concept of “the human” is essentially a social construct that evolves over
time and is now undergoing a moment of historical adaptation.
In Sources of the Self, his classic study of the modern concept of the self,
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor explores how the notion of interiority
(the idea that we have an authentic self buried deep within us) and affect were,
from the late 17th century, increasingly associated with what it meant to be

était la première année de ces mille ans.” For Rousseau, it is this very perfectibility which risks
turning one into a tyrant: “Pourquoi l’homme seul est-il sujet à devenir imbécile? N’est-ce
point qu’il retourne ainsi dans son état primitif, et que, tandis que la bête, qui n’a rien acquis
et qui n’a rien non plus à perdre, reste toujours avec son instinct, l’homme reperdant par
la vieillesse ou d’autres accidents tout ce que sa perfectibilité lui avait fait acquérir, retombe
ainsi plus bas que la bête même? Il serait triste pour nous d’être forcés de convenir, que
cette faculté distinctive, et presque illimitée, est la source de tous les malheurs de l’homme;
que c’est elle qui le tire, à force de temps, de cette condition originaire, dans laquelle il coul-
erait des jours tranquilles et innocents; que c’est elle, qui faisait éclore avec les siècles ses
lumières et ses erreurs, ses vices et ses vertus, le rend à la longue le tyran de lui-même et de
la nature” (90).
20 chapter 1

human. The artist, it was thought increasingly beginning in late 18th and early
19th century romanticism, was that special person whose key strength lay in
the ability to communicate to others a more deeply felt and better expressed
humanity (ostensibly by first exploring his or her “inner self”). Thus, for ­Taylor,
the modern concept of humanity, or “the human” is built upon a sense of
unique inwardness, what he calls an “orientation toward the good” (that is, a
moral sense) and the placing of our lives into a narrative (a sense of where we
have been, where we are and where we are headed – especially with respect to
an ethical ideal).
Narrative’s role in identity formation is key for many theorists and philoso-
phers, including the French philosopher Paul Ricœur who in Time and Nar-
rative posits a theory of “narrative identity” summarized later in Oneself as
Another9 a work in which he examines the way that action and narrative in-
terweave creating a “sediment” of the self. This sediment is character, created
through a repetition that combines the simultaneous presence of two seem-
ingly opposed ways to conceive of personal identity: as ipse (uniqueness or
selfhood) and idem (identity as sameness). In Oneself as Another Ricœur insists
upon the temporal dimension of the self since “the person of whom we are
speaking and the agent on whom the action depends have a history, are their
own history” (113). He goes on to state categorically that “personal identity, […]
can be articulated only in the temporal dimension of human existence” (114).
It is via a theory of narrative that Ricœur approaches a theory of the self. On
this view, it is narrative emplotment that allows for “character and keeping
one’s word” (118). This latter concept, that the self as idem (or sameness) may
be reconciled with a dynamic yet unique self (or ipse) by keeping one’s word,
is derived from the temporal aspect of the self. It is as a relation to itself and
to others (to one’s past self as an other) that the ethical effort to keep a prom-
ise plays out, not as repetition of the same but as repetition with difference
(even if only temporal difference) allowing for the narrative substrate of the
self to take hold. All of these temporal considerations are closely tied not only
to the capacity to project oneself into a possible future (created by proffering
the promise one must later keep), but also through memory.

9 In Oneself as Another Ricœur explains that the concept of “narrative identity” means taking
“the following chain of assertions as valid: self-understanding is an interpretation; interpreta-
tion of the self, in turn, finds in the narrative, among other signs and symbols, a privileged
form of mediation; the latter borrows from history as well as from fiction, making a life story
a fictional history or, if one prefers, a historical fiction, interweaving the historiographic style
of biographies with the novelistic style of imaginary autobiographies” (114).
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 21

Descartes (in Discourse on Method, 1637) and John Locke (in An Essay Con-
cerning Human Understanding, 1690) defined the self as essentially appearing
to itself with clarity (positing a self-aware, or self-conscious subject), others
in the twentieth century such as Charles Taylor and Paul Ricœur emphasize
the situated, narrative and ethical aspects of the self. While Locke bases his
concept of personal identity on memory and upon consciousness “extending
backwards to unite thought and action”10 for Taylor and Ricœur personal iden-
tity is relational being constituted by relationships and narratives that help
situate a life in a meaningful trajectory.
What becomes clear is that the split between these two groups, both of
which favor the role of the conscious mind in creating and maintaining the
self, centers on the body. Yet, while the first group tends to favor the mind
and rationality over embodiment as determining factors in establishing who
one is and the second tends to emphasize embodiment, both agree that con-
sciousness (defined both as first-person sensual perception and mental self-­
awareness) and memory are key to the self.

Consciousness

Consciousness has been famously defined by Thomas Nagel as “what it is like”

to be someone, with a strong emphasis on the first-person perspective.11 The
modernist interest in consciousness of writers such as Virginia Woolf, André
Gide and James Joyce as well as the later experiments of writers such as Jorge
Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar have given way, after many years of transfor-
mations which passed through the experiments in depersonalization of the

10 Locke (2004 [1690]) 276.

11 The term consciousness is, of course, multivalent. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy outlines at least five main areas of investigation of consciousness: sentience,
wakefulness, self-consciousness, “what it is like,” subject of conscious states and transi-
tive consciousness. Here is how Nagel’s definition is presented: “Thomas Nagel’s (1974)
famous ‘what it is like’ criterion aims to capture another and perhaps more subjective no-
tion of being a conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there
is ‘something that it is like’ to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems
or appears from the creature’s mental or experiential point of view. In Nagel’s example,
bats are conscious because there is something that it is like for a bat to experience its
world through its echo-locatory senses, even though we humans from our human point
of view cannot emphatically understand what such a mode of consciousness is like from
the bat’s own point of view.” For a detailed discussion of these different areas, see http://
plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/.
22 chapter 1

nouveau roman, to a contemporary fascination with the body and the mind
present on both sides of the Atlantic which takes consciousness again as the
defining characteristic of the human. A similar move has occurred in cinema
where films such as The Matrix series (Wachowski, 1999–2003), I, Robot (Proyas,
2004), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004), Avatar (Cameron,
2009), Inception (Nolan, 2011); even children’s films such as Inside Out (Docter,
Del Carmen, 2015) among many others have examined the nexus between
mind, identity and embodiment.12
In The Feeling of What Happens, a study of the neuroscience behind the phe-
nomenon of consciousness, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio highlights essen-
tial features of the brain while insisting on the fact that it must be viewed as an
“embodied brain” (one that is intimately dependent upon the feedback of the
body whose physical structure must be taken into account):

…it is easy to envision how consciousness is likely to have opened the way
in human evolution to a new order of creations not possible without it:
conscience, religion, social and political organizations, the arts, the sci-
ences, and technology. Perhaps even more compellingly, consciousness
is the critical biological function that allows us to know sorrow or know
joy, to know suffering or know pleasure, to sense embarrassment or pride,
to grieve for lost love or lost life. Whether individually experienced or
observed, pathos is a by-product of consciousness and so is desire. None
of those personal states would be known to each of us without conscious-
ness. (Damasio 4)

Thus, we can see how the very qualities that are identified as being quintessen-
tially human are dependent upon consciousness which in turn is what produc-
es our sense of self in the world. While distinguishing between what he calls
“core consciousness” (consisting of fundamental perceptual capabilities and a
basic sense of self) from “extended consciousness” (which provides “an elabo-
rate sense of self” and greater temporal and spatial awareness), Damasio con-
tends that consciousness is necessary for the human organism’s very survival.
In Philosophy in the Flesh, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher
Mark Johnson argue that the fact of the mind’s embodiment coupled with
the fundamentally metaphorical nature of thought and linguistic expression

12 The growing mainstream obsession with the mind and cognitive science more generally
may also be seen in the popularity of “brain game” websites such as Lumosity.com (whose
motto is “Discover what your brain can do”) which claims more than 50 million users
worldwide.
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 23

mean that a rethinking of Western philosophy is in order. They point out (as
does Elaine Scarry in different terms) that human embodiment is what serves
as the first and most essential framework for perceiving, understanding and
representing the world. Because the body’s perceptual faculties require a sim-
plification and categorization process (rendered necessary, for example, by the
excess of receptors in the eye which would otherwise send too great an amount
of information to the brain), perceptual information must be canalized into a
limited number of channels and categories. This is a process which requires
the ability to group viewed objects into sets with specific characteristics rather
than as completely unique items, thus freeing up the brain to notice only sig-
nificant pattern changes (for example when a shelf of books appears in one’s
peripheral vision, the brain will reduce the work of recognition to categorizing
the shapes perceived simply as books rather than analyzing the characteristics
of each book separately).
In addition to the process of filtering and categorizing, the mind fills in gaps
in information – assuming that an incomplete but familiar image may simply
be completed with remembered or assumed data. The structure of the eye, for
example, is such that the mind must compensate for its blind spot, by scan-
ning the visual field through regular movements (which are so rapid that we
do not normally notice them), rather than simply focusing on a single point.
The brain must then piece together the overlapping visual information in each
image it receives, filling in what is missing from each image and creating the
illusion of a single, smooth, complete view – much like the work of the mind
pieces together and fills in the blanks of our life stories to create the illusion of
a cohesive, stable self.13
Yet, despite this ability to fill in gaps, the position of the eyes in front of
the face necessarily colors one’s view of the world – through an awareness of
larger gaps, such as the space behind one, that are less frequently filled or more
difficult to fill. The mind is embodied but it only has direct access to, and full
confidence in its capacity to fill in data about what lies in front of it. Assump-
tions must be made about other spaces, other times, other minds but we are
nonetheless aware that greater doubt surrounds what we cannot see. The em-
bodied mind uses the body it is in as a frame, and as a first paradigm against
which to compare other objects. This is why, Lakoff and Johnson argue, one
projects certain features, for example a front and back, onto objects that do not
have them (such as trees).

13 On the mind’s ability to “fill in gaps” and the importance of subconscious awareness
(roughly equivalent to Damasio’s core consciousness), see Mlodinow (2013).
24 chapter 1

This focus on the body has had an impact on narratology, film studies and
new media studies in which theorists are beginning to place the body at the
center of the affective process whereby the possible worlds offered to specta-
tors and readers are experienced through the embodied mind. Daniel Punday
(Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology) has used some of Lakoff
and Johnson’s insights on embodiment to argue that narrative texts should
be seen as sharing the same marks of projection of corporeality as has David
MacDougall in the area of cinema studies (Film, Ethnology, and the Image: The
Corporeal Image).
Also in Film Studies, Laura Marks (in The Skin of the Film) and Vivian
­Sobchack (in The Address of the Eye) both take an embodied approach to the
experience of cinema spectatorship. In the field of New Media studies, the pio-
neering work of Marie-Laure Ryan (in Narrative as Virtual Reality and Narrative
Across Media) and Mark N.B. Hansen (in New Philosophy for New Media) both
insist upon the active role that the body plays for the receiver or viewer of art-
work in the immersive process of interpretation.
We will return to the work of some of these theorists at several points in this
study; for the time being I would like to insist upon the fact that what emerges
from the cognitive science, philosophy of mind and the narratology, film and
new media studies mentioned above is that not only it is impossible to neglect
the key role of the body in perception and cognition (i.e. in consciousness and
reception), but one must take this primordial filtering tool as a porous two-
way cloth – which filters and categorizes the information that it receives and
adapts to the structures and images that it comes into contact with.
There rages, of course, a complex debate around the specifics of how con-
sciousness functions and how it is brought about. As we will see, too often,
especially – but not only – in philosophy of mind and theory, otherwise com-
patible positions are radicalized in order to draw starker contrasts between
them. In the face of this tendency, this study marshals insights from different
theories of consciousness in order to show how central points common to all
may help us better understand contemporary narrative works.

Daniel Dennett on Consciousness: The Human as Virtual Machine

One of the key voices in philosophy of mind debates for more than twenty-five
years has been that of philosopher Daniel Dennett, whose multidisciplinary
work has also had an impact on evolutionary psychology and other fields.
At the end of Dennett’s convincing work combining insights from neuropsy-
chology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind, provocatively entitled
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 25

Consciousness Explained (1991), he negates one of the central tenets of what

Charles Taylor has identified as the “modern self” (based on the concept of
interiority and an inner, “authentic” self). Having argued extensively against
the notion that consciousness is an ineffable process by which an inner self
receives sensations and is shaped by them, a concept he calls the “Cartesian
Theater,” Dennett proposes a model for consciousness that includes no core,
but rather which is a process constantly renewed by the millions of intercon-
nections between neurons in a dynamic information gathering system of the
brain which he calls the “Multiple Drafts” model. In this model, the brain works
like a team of editors, constantly revising and comparing the information it re-
ceives, yet never reaching a definitive text. His disembodied approach to con-
sciousness, based as it is on a privileging of the process of content gathering
rather than the corporeal aspect of its filtering and storage (unlike Francisco
Varela, George Lakoff or Mark Johnson) leads him to assert that what we think
of as the “self” is really nothing more than a “center of narrative gravity,” i.e. a
fictional story we constantly revise – like the brain compensating for gaps in
visual information. Here he focuses (like Locke before him) on the question of
continuity in constituting a coherent sense of self. As we will see with D ­ erek
Parfit, whose teleportation thought experiment imagines a “person” being
teleported from one distant place to the next by the transfer of “psychological
continuity,”14 Dennett concludes that this sense of self is simply information
which as such is not intrinsically dependent upon the corporeal form it hap-
pens to take:

If you think of yourself as a center of narrative gravity […] your existence

depends on the persistence of that narrative […] which could theoretical-
ly survive indefinitely many switches of medium, be teleported as read-
ily (in principle) as the evening news, and stored indefinitely as sheer
information. If what you are is that organization of information that has
structured your body’s control system (or, to put it in its more usual pro-
vocative form, if what you are is the program that runs on your brain’s

14 In Reasons and Persons, Parfit sets forth a “reductive” theory which posits that personal
identity can be “impersonally described” (i.e. a third person, scientific perspective can
catalogue all that is essential in a given person’s identity and theoretically transfer these
elements once identified into another body without loss). The teleportation thought ex-
periment to which Parfit refers is a reference to the original Star Trek television show, and
posits that such a machine could theoretically copy, destroy and reassemble a person on
another planet without loss of personal identity as long as psychological continuity has not
been lost.
26 chapter 1

computer), then you could in principle survive the death of your body as
intact as a program can survive the destruction of the computer on which
it was first created and first run. (Dennett 430)

Yet Dennett does not abandon the essentials of what are usually recognized
as characterizing humans: self-awareness (or consciousness), rationality, the
capacity to suffer and the desire to survive. This is so despite the fact that he
defines suffering as simply more information coupled with self-awareness (ar-
guing that humans have a greater capacity for suffering simply because their
more developed brains are better able than those of other animals to com-
prehend the import of having one’s life plans, or “narrative,” interrupted).15
Note that, though Dennett rejects metaphysical explanations for the self, such
as those that posit a soul, he shares an immediate interest in the overall goal

15 In Kinds of Minds (1996) Dennett notes that with respect to the pain felt by animals, “to
matter – whether or not we call them pains, or conscious states, or experiences – there
must be an enduring subject to whom they matter because they are a source of suffering”
(161). In What is Posthumanism? (2010) Cary Wolfe cites this as evidence that Dennett
is in fact perpetuating the same Cartesianism that he explicitly rejects – as his theory
ostensibly requires a “self” to be present for language’s representation (something Wolfe
argues language cannot do). Yet the “center of narrative gravity” need not be formulat-
ed, as Wolfe seems to view it, as a separate instantiation tantamount to recreating the
homunculus in the mind that Dennett rejects. What Dennett describes is an ongoing
process, self as direction not substance (with no inner spectator), thus despite Dennett’s
representational language, the concept of flow interruption which trauma constitutes fits
well with the system theory that Wolfe defends. That is to say that what we call “suffering”
(in the privileged sense of conscious awareness of pain as unexpectedly modifying life
narrative) may be simply viewed as more information which human consciousness, taken
as a system, deals with as interruption – i.e. a new element which redirects its systemic
informational flow. Wolfe argues that Dennett’s use of the concept of “enduring subject”
posits a difference between humans and nonhumans which is not simply of degree but
of kind (suggesting a certain metaphysics). The difference here is explained by the way in
which animals and humans perceive time (and thus their capacity to build up the fiction
of an enduring subject). The human ability, the need, to emplot action in narrative time
is what gives rise to the “center of narrative gravity.” Wolfe highlights in particular what he
sees as the ethical problems that arise from the distinctions that Dennett draws: “And just
as different forms of being human in the world are re-written, as they are [in Dennett’s
work], in terms of a homogenous Cartesian ideal, so nonhuman beings, in all their diver-
sity, are now rendered not as fully complete forms of life that are radically irreducible to
such a thin, idealized account of what counts as subjectivity but rather as diminished or
crippled versions of the fantasy figure called the human-the Cartesian cogito now rewrit-
ten as the user-illusion qua enduring subject.” (45).
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 27

posited by ethical systems both religious and secular: the perpetuation of “the
self” through its survival in some form. In the end, Dennett concedes that hu-
mans are characterized by the extent to which their brains are developed (i.e.
their capacity for abstract thought and empathy), while highlighting the im-
portance of narrative and “continuity” as crucial to personal identity. Though
Dennett’s approach to consciousness is theoretically one which defends the
thesis of the transportability of the model of mind he devises (thus rendering
the mind’s instantiation in the body a contingent fact, not a necessary one),
it is interesting to note that much of his theory is in fact compatible with an
embodied approach. Thus, the key debate today between proponents of the
embodied mind and philosophers like Dennett centers not so much on wheth-
er the brain is actually embodied but on (a) whether this embodiment renders
impossible the objective or impersonal description of the first-person experi-
ence of consciousness and (b) whether consciousness as we know it requires
human embodiment.
I take an embodied approach to the mind and personal identity, one which
emphasizes the role of the body in providing (and shaping) perceptual infor-
mation to the mind but without making an argument as to whether or not
human embodiment is the only means of producing consciousness – such an
argument is beyond the scope of this work. Interestingly, one of the points
I make in this book revolves around the ways in which the underlying human-
istic views of the self privilege a discourse of an inner authentic self which
may survive in non-corporeal or a different corporeal form (one which as pure
idea may be preserved after the body’s destruction). Such narratives engage
this possibility even though they also highlight the inherently embodied na-
ture of the mind and the self as it is experienced by the characters. Thus, there
is a clear tension in these works between an initially embodied state for the
self and the possibility of some type of disembodied or other-bodied survival.
Like the attempt to preserve and extend the home country’s culture in a far
off colony – in a different space –, one detects in the texts and films examined
starting in the next chapter the ancient hope that the essence of the self may
be preserved even beyond the body’s demise.
Narrative topoi, such as that of a stable if fictional self, the privileging of
pain as the mark of the human and the dream of recuperative correction of the
past (in order to preserve the self) continue to appear in contemporary litera-
ture and film suggesting that, despite the new instantiations of the body and
the human/posthuman subject, the trace of the human remains vital. These
topoi persist not only because of the force of inertia backing them but also
because the reader/viewer’s brain is hardwired to seek out such narrative rep-
resentations or even to construct them where possible.
28 chapter 1

Indeed, narrative itself (and its concomitant projection of self in lived time)
as Paul Ricœur argues, remains the fundamental means by which the mind sit-
uates itself. It is precisely because of trauma’s resistance to the emplotment of
a logical narrative arc that it disrupts and undermines personal identity. For all
the discussion about the radical nature of the current shift toward a melding of
flesh and silicon in the cyborgs we are becoming, it is the narrative needs of the
embodied mind that most distinguish it from the artificial intelligence capabili-
ties of computers and robots. This need for temporally emplotted narrative is
the result both of cognition’s link to the body and the fact that the contours of
the self are sculpted by a story constantly being edited, checked and enhanced
by the mind. When artificial intelligence improves to the point of creating a
digital narrative identity (e.g. through simulated embodiment), and the net-
worked consciousness of the apparatuses (such as robots) which deploy it gain
a sense of lived past, present and future as well as spatial situation and bodily
affect the difference between artificial life and human life will no longer hold.
That will be the first true step into a paradigm which fully erases the difference
between human and machine. Conversely, should humans develop a way of
generating and maintaining a personal identity which does not rely in any way
on narrative (irrespective of whether such narrative is linguistically or visually
based, it is created as a function of embodiment) – a highly dubious p ­ ossibility
– not only will creative works no longer need narrative but art itself may no
longer be necessary. In such a case we will have essentially become computers
ourselves.

Temporality, Consciousness and Ethics

The fictional works that I examine approach the question of consciousness

and the human from the standpoint of the ethical questions that arise from the
following three elements: the body (often suffering or traumatized), narrative,
and consciousness. All three of these elements are connected in such a way
that any break in a single element leads to a fissure in the two others. Trauma
itself leads to a break in one’s capacities to narrate one’s life that endangers
psychological continuity, producing changes in one’s sense of self. Indeed, psy-
chological continuity is key to personal identity and cannot be separated from
an embodied experience of the world.
If consciousness always implies a double-layered structure (perception
of the world through the senses and awareness of this same perceptive pro-
cess), it is defined by at least two key aspects: intentionality (i.e. “focusing,
directing the mind”) and temporality. The relationship between the self and
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 29

its temporality plays a crucial role in the way that consciousness constantly
constructs and verifies one’s sense of self. This temporality is threefold. While
our consciousness would seem upon first consideration to be directed solely
toward the present moment, it must in fact maintain a “temporal horizon,”
including in addition to the present, both expectations for the future and
awareness of the immediate past. This tripartite temporality holds, as has been
recently argued,16 even in sleep.
Making use of the insights of the philosopher Edmund Husserl, whose ap-
proach to ontology influenced generations of other phenomenologists,17 in
The View From Within and The Embodied Mind neuroscientist Francisco Varela
explores ways of understanding first-person present-time consciousness of
“situated embodied agents.”18 As a neuroscientist, Varela takes into account the
physical structure of the brain in his account of how it works, and his views,
though coupled with those of continental philosophers such as Husserl, are
essentially based upon scientific observation. Varela argues that the way in
which we experience the present cannot be approached from a disembodied
“computational” standpoint. Rather than being experienced as a line, time is
“felt” (through the body) in all its texture: “[Time] does not present itself as
a linear sequence but as having a complex texture (whence James’ ‘specious
present,’ it is not a ‘knife edge’ present), and its fullness is so outstanding that
it dominates our existence to an important degree” (112).
This point about the present not simply being a punctual moment is essen-
tial because Varela is insisting here that our experience of time’s fullness, our
sense of “lived time” includes our consciousness of future possibilities, the im-
mediate past, and emotional information (affect) concerning what we are ex-
periencing (seeing, thinking, feeling etc.). Varela wants us to see that because
we are embodied, we cannot conceive of time, and specifically our experience
of the present merely as a moving point on a line:

In a first approximation this texture can be described as follows: There

is always a centre, the now moment with a focused intentional content
(say, this room with my computer in front of me on which the letters
I am typing are highlighted). This centre is bounded by a horizon or fringe
that is already past (I still hold the beginning of the sentence I just wrote),

16 See Macduffie and Mashour (2010).

17 Phenomenology may be defined as the study of consciousness. This philosophical meth-
od of analysis of phenomena which appear to a consciousness was first launched with
Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–01).
18 Quotes of Varela are from Varela (2002).
30 chapter 1

and it projects towards an intended next moment (this writing session

is still unfinished). These horizons are mobile: this very moment which
was present (and hence was not merely described, but lived as such) slips
towards an immediately past present. (Varela 112–113)

Here Varela interestingly associates time and space (a moving horizon) in

which the self is situated. This presupposes the crucial aspect of the body.
Media theorist Mark B.N. Hansen (in New Philosophy for New Media) also
situates the body at the center of our perceptual capacities, concentrating re-
spectively on the way in which the body shapes our consciousness through the
figures of the metaphor and the frame. Hansen shares Merleau-Ponty’s attribu-
tion of knowledge and consciousness to a precognitive capacity over which we
do not have direct control and to which we do not have access. Key to Hansen’s
work on new media is the notion, which he develops from French philoso-
pher Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory and the work of Francisco Varela,
that affect is what shapes our experience of temporality: “Affect, accordingly,
must lie at the very origin of [lived] time” (253). Working with Varela’s findings
concerning the three different scales at which humans incorporate and frame
lived time (respectively 1/10 for “elementary events,” 1 for perceptual integra-
tion and 10 scale for “descriptive-narrative assessments”) Hansen sees in digital
media’s capacity to slow down perceived time (by projecting ultra-high-speed
film images at the standard video frame rate of 30 fps, thus revealing details
in facial expressions which would otherwise remain beneath the threshold of
conscious experience) a vital supplement to our perceptual capacities render-
ing visible precisely the affect which impacts the viewer without him or her
being aware of it:

What Varela’s analysis contributes to our understanding of the time-

image and machine time is a thematization of affectivity as a concrete
constraint on the human temporal experience. By correlating the phe-
nomenological category of affectivity with the temporality of the neuro-
processing underlying the emergence of the perceived now, Varela makes
a strong case for linking the particular flexibility and limitations of the
human experience of time – including any image of time – with the ca-
pacities and constraints of the more or less fixed “hardware” of our neural
architecture and its sensorimotor embodiment. (Hansen 250)

Essentially what Hansen argues is that, by taking into account the body’s per-
ceptual structures and the hierarchy in which it integrates time, one subjec-
tivizes time through corporeal affective filters. This vital connection between
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 31

perception, lived time and affect as bodily filter helps explain the altered tem-
porality of trauma as we will see in Chapter 2.
Accepting the fact that affect frames temporal perception means placing
the body at the origin of what Damasio has termed “core consciousness.” At the
heart of the debate over consciousness is the question of whether perceptual
information may be conceived of outside any receiving frame. As we will see,
in Chapter 4, in our discussion of N. Katherine Hayles work on posthumanism,
the approach one takes to the question of embodiment – whether it is viewed
not simply as central to human information processing and consciousness, but
also to the information itself – determines notions of whether the human may
be replaced by the synthetic or the robotic.
On the one hand, the disembodied, computational approach of Daniel Den-
nett (whose “multiple drafts” model for consciousness posits no central con-
trol mechanism to the brain) and, on the other, the embodied approach of
­Varela, Lakoff, Johnson and Hansen will serve as general markers for what we
will explore under the rubrics of respectively “the posthuman” and the “hu-
man.” For, as Dennett readily admits, when human suffering can be reduced
simply to “more data,” ethics becomes more difficult since pain loses its stand-
ing in the hierarchy of feelings (all of which are reduced to mere information)
and humans are no longer fundamentally distinguishable from machines (hu-
mans minds are referred to by Dennett as “virtual machines”).
Yet, despite these important differences, I will suggest that an embodied ap-
proach to consciousness, which benefits from the insights of Merleau-Ponty,
Lakoff and Johnson, Hansen, Varela and others may profitably be combined
with the approaches of Daniel Dennett and Derek Parfit. This is so because
their views on the self as “center of narrative gravity” (Dennett) and on “what
matters in survival” (Parfit) are especially useful in my discussion of a charac-
teristically humanist desire for survival of the self that carries over into other-
bodied selves. This desire is taken a step further in Duncan Jones’ film Moon,
which I examine in Chapter 4. The latter imagines the possibility of keeping
one’s word (in Ricœur’s terms) not personally but through a kind of transper-
sonal survival as embodied by a clone.

Immersion and Framing: The Experience of Film and Literature

Recognizing that one’s sense of self is linked to the body, its perceptual
capacities and its relationship with other bodies and spaces, the act of read-
ing or viewing a narrative work involves slipping from one narrative space
into another (leaving one possible or actual world for another). Studying how
32 chapter 1

immersive narrative reception affects one’s sense of self means taking a phe-
nomenological approach (one that privileges the lived, embodied approach
to consciousness). Marie-Laure Ryan’s pioneering studies into the phenom-
enology of the experience of reader and viewer with regard to both traditional
narrative prose and “new media” (such as immersive video games and art in-
stallations that require wearing either special sensor gloves or entire suits de-
signed to stimulate the body) are of great use here.
In Narrative as Virtual Reality Ryan defends the immersive experience
against criticism that it is essentially passive, maintaining that it in fact must
be understood as an active process by which the mind is engaged in filling in
the blanks: “As for the allegedly passive character of the experience, we need
only be reminded of the complex mental activity that goes into the produc-
tion of a vivid mental picture of a textual world. Since language does not offer
input to the senses, all sensory data must be simulated by the imagination” (11).
Ryan is concerned with “virtual reality” or vr. She argues that narrative con-
stitutes a virtual reality while explaining the three separate meanings of the
term “virtual”: “I have suggested here three distinct senses of virtual: an optical
one (the virtual as illusion), a scholastic one (the virtual as potentiality), and
an informal technological one (the virtual as the computer-mediated)” (13).
It is precisely the element of the potential, or virtual (in its second meaning
which Ryan calls “scholastic”) which most distinguishes human cognition from
that of other sentient beings – that is, the human is in part built upon the
various tensions running through the actual and the virtual (the lived and
the meta-body). Thus the embodied self should not be conceived of only with
respect to an actual lived body since what narrative does is play upon the
difference between proposed spatial and bodily experience and actual lived
experiences. Our “lived body,” that is our experience of embodiment, is it-
self not merely a discrete physical experience, but rather it is also the way in
which this experience is received by our consciousness according to evolving
paradigms offered to us by narratives, be they cinematic or literary. Each me-
dium offers up to us the possibility of virtually penetrating a space and being
immersed in affect other than our own (e.g. experiencing a fictional character’s
emotions as one’s own). The ways in which those spaces are framed is thus
crucial.
Phenomenology in particular emphasizes frames since humans perceive
reality and thus themselves through a first-person perspective (or frame) that
provides one with a position from which to build a sense of self. It is precisely
this singular position which posthumanism threatens to erase, for example,
by outsourcing the mind to artificially intelligent computers. In contrast to
this type of distributed posthuman blurring of the subject position, Erving
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 33

Goffman explains that film essentially blocks out what lies beyond its frame,
signaling that a new set of rules govern what lies within it.19 Paratextual stud-
ies, such as those of Gérard Genette,20 have shown that the same dynamic oc-
curs in literature, where generic markers either explicitly set out in the des-
ignation “novel,” “essay,” “thriller” etc. below the title, or in the style in which
the title is written, as well as cover art on a given book, tell the reader what to
expect from the text before the reading process has begun. In so far as genres
constitute a set of expectations, and therefore a more or less well-defined set
of rules, they function as frames.
In “Photography and Fetish” Christian Metz draws a distinction between
photography and film which is generated precisely by the difference between
the way in which the viewer experiences what is off-frame (outside the frame)
in photography and cinema.21 The movement and thus temporal dimension
of film, as well as the sheer size of the cinema screen are what constitute the
fundamental differences between photography and film and have a direct ef-
fect on our understanding of what has escaped the lens in each case. For Metz
(who refers to Dubois and Barthes’ comments in Camera Lucida in support of
his contentions) the link between photography and death is clear: “The im-
portance of immobility and silence to photographic authority, the non-filmic
nature of this authority, leads me to some remarks on the relationship of pho-
tography and death. Immobility and silence are not only two objective aspects
of death, they are also its main symbols, they figure it” (83). If we relate this
study of the medium (film and photography) to the way it is perceived by the
viewer, it is interesting to note that while the frame offered by the photograph
represents an erasure of the subject of the photo, it enacts a new space into
which to project the self.
Usefully, for our study, Metz also links photography, via its rapport with
death, to an act of erasure akin to forgetting since it effects an “abduction,” a
removal of the living from its temporal trajectory: “the snapshot, like death, is
an instantaneous abduction of the object out of one world into another world,
into another kind of time – unlike cinema which replaces the object, after the
act of appropriation, in an unfolding time similar to that of life” (84). He goes
on to argue that “In film there is a plurality of successive frames, of camera
movements, and character movements, so that a person or an object which is

19 See Goffman (1974).

20 See Genette (1997/1987).
21 According to Metz (1985), who opposes photography’s timeless character to the cinema’s
generation of “lived time” which helps build one’s narrative identity: “The filmic off-frame
is étoffé, let us say ‘substantial,’ whereas the photographic off-frame space is ‘subtle’” (86).
34 chapter 1

off-frame in a given moment may appear inside the frame the moment after,
then disappear again, and so on…” (86).
Here, Metz makes a key point, by referring to the continuity enhancing
function music and ambient sound provide film: “The off-frame is taken into
the evolutions and scansions of the temporal flow: it is off-frame, but not off
film. Furthermore, the very existence of a sound track allows a character who
has deserted the visual scene to continue to mark her or his presence in the
auditory scene […] If the filmic off-frame is substantial, it is because we gener-
ally know, or are able to guess more or less precisely, what is going on in it. The
character who is out of frame in a photograph, however, will never come into
the frame, will never be heard – again a death…” (86–87). This distinction be-
tween the two media is tenuous however since photographs may be displayed,
as they often are, in sequences which include, exclude and then bring back
the same character, much the way film can. In this case, even a single photo
can suggest or cause the viewer to anticipate the presence of a character lying
outside the frame. Additionally, what is off-frame in film not always necessarily
easy to place for the viewer nor do filmmakers always want us to do so. Sound is
not always used to remind viewers of what off-frame characters may be doing
and being off-frame in both media can mean being “disappeared.”
In as much as both photography and film may be narrative and therefore
temporal, I would suggest that the distinction Metz makes between the two
may be somewhat elided or at least nuanced. The most important of his points
to retain here is that both media effect what he terms an “abduction,” one which
I view as stimulating the viewer’s desire to invest other bodies and inhabit oth-
er spaces. While relating this curatorial practice of removal from “human time”
into a protected, framed space, which he refers to as that of the fetish, Metz
posits that this move carries the contradictory elements of loss (through “sym-
bolic castration”) and “protection from loss.” This is so because the fetish and
the photograph serve the dual purpose of removing the subject from danger
(the ravages of time) and symbolic killing (through the negation of a temporal
trajectory). For Metz, film does exactly the opposite, going as far as to say that
“film gives back to the dead a semblance of life, a fragile semblance…” (84). We
will return to this paradoxical tension between loss and protection from loss
(effected in this case via suicide) in our discussions of Alejandro Amenábar’s
film Mar adentro and Duncan Jones’ film Moon. This contradictory desire (to
destroy and to protect, or to protect by destroying) is characteristic of the recu-
perative project in humanist narrative and one which we will uncover in many
of the narratives examined here.
Despite the sharp contrast that Metz draws between photography and film,
the fundamental question of frames (what is included, and what is kept out) is
The Human, Consciousness And Its Temporality 35

problematic in these media as much as in literary texts. If the immersive expe-

rience that Ryan describes across several narrative media is one that requires
complex mental activity, as the viewer or reader supplies content that the nar-
rative elides, it is also specifically meant to be an experience of a “possible
world” that removes us from our own. In this sense it is not just the subject cut
out of the frame who is “abducted,” nor the one who is included, but also the
reader or viewer herself. We read and view films as much with our bodies as we
do with our minds, for, as I have been arguing, if the mind is embodied, then
the visual and mental experiences of imagining a possible narrative world is
also an embodied one. Ryan makes this clear with the following quote from
Merleau-Ponty’s The Primacy of Perception:

We grasp external space through our bodily situation. A “corporeal or

postural schema” gives us at every moment a global, practical, and im-
plicit notion of the relation between our bodies and things, of our hold in
them. A system of possible movements, or “motor projects,” radiates from
us to our environment. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or
haunts space (5)22

Both literature and film offer “possible worlds”23 in which to imagine another
self and models with which to compare the lived self’s trajectory. Narrative
serves as a mediating structure by which the human integrates the nonhuman
and the self evolves by trying out possible selves. When we inhabit narrative
space (applying Merleau-Ponty’s expression to virtual space) we are afforded
the opportunity to imagine ourselves otherwise and temporarily leave behind
the lived body. In the same way, though it is true that memory is key to main-
taining the continuity necessary for a coherent sense of self, a certain amount
of forgetting is also crucial. In fact, maintaining a proper relation to memory is
central to the way in which the mind works and, as we will see, it is also key to
ethical action in the world.

22 Quoted in Ryan (2001, 70).

23 Inasmuch as the contemplation of a “possible world” involves accounting for various fluc-
tuating parameters of action and ethical decisions as well as projecting the embodied
mind into a possible self, it invokes key aspects of consciousness. This relates as well to
the issue of “filling in the blanks” in reader response theory by which readers (and view-
ers for that matter) will, according to the rules established by the fictional world they are
engaging with as well as the rules of the world they actually inhabit will provide whatever
information is lacking in the narrative (i.e. they fill in the blanks). For more information
see Eco (1984), McHale (1987), Pavel (1986), Ryan (1991) and Ronen (1994).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 What shall we do? Do now, that none of these things may come
upon us unawares? We are wisely and diligently providing for our
defence against one enemy: with such a watchful wisdom and active
diligence, as is a comfort to every honest Englishman. But why
should we not shew the same wisdom and diligence in providing
against all our enemies? And if our own wisdom and strength be
sufficient to defend us, let us not seek any further. Let us without
delay recruit our forces and guard our coasts against the famine and
murrain and pestilence; and still more carefully against immoderate
rains and winds, and lightnings and earthquakes and comets: that
we may no longer be under any painful apprehensions of any
present or future danger, but may smile

“Secure amidst the jar of elements,

The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds!”

But if our own wisdom and strength be not sufficient to defend us,
let us not be ashamed to seek farther help. Let us even dare to own,
we believe there is a God: nay, and not a lazy, indolent, epicurean
deity, who sits at ease upon the circle of the heavens, and neither
knows nor cares what is done below: but one who as he created
heaven and earth, and all the armies of them, as he sustains them
all by the word of his power, so cannot neglect the work of his own
hands. With pleasure we own there is such a God, whose eye
pervades the whole sphere of created beings, who knoweth the
number of the stars, and calleth them all by their names: a God
whose wisdom is as the great abyss, deep and wide as eternity:
 “Who high in power, in the beginning said,

Let sea, and air, and earth, and heaven be made,

And it was so. And when he shall ordain

In other sort, hath but to speak again,

And they shall be no more.”

Yet more: whose mercy riseth above the heavens, and his
faithfulness above the clouds: who is loving to every man, and his
mercy over all his works: let us secure him on our side. Let us make
this wise, this powerful, this gracious God our friend! Then need we
not fear, though the earth be moved and the hills be carried into the
midst of the sea: no, not though the heavens being on fire are
dissolved, and the very elements melt with fervent heat. It is enough
that the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of love is our everlasting
refuge.

But how shall we secure the favour of this great God? How, but
by worshipping him in spirit and in truth: by uniformly imitating him
we worship, in all his imitable perfections; without which the most
accurate systems of opinions, all external modes of religion, are idle
cobwebs of the brain, dull farce and empty show. Now God is love.
Love God then, and you are a true worshipper. Love mankind, and
God is your God, your Father, and your friend. But see that you
deceive not your own soul; for this is not a point of small importance.
And by this you may know; if you love God, then you are happy in
God. If you love God, riches, honours, and the pleasures of sense
are no more to you than bubbles on the water: you look on dress and
equipage as the tossels of a fool’s cap, diversions, as the bells on a
fool’s coat. If you love God, God is in all your thoughts, and your
whole life is a sacrifice to him. And if you love mankind, it is your one
design, desire and endeavour to spread virtue and happiness all
around you; to lessen the present sorrows, and increase the joys of
every child of man; and if it be possible, to bring them with you to the
rivers of pleasure that are at God’s right-hand for evermore.
 But where shall you find one who answers this happy and
amiable character? Wherever you find a Christian: for this, and this
alone is real, genuine Christianity. Surely you did not imagine, that
Christianity was no more than such a system of opinions as is
vulgarly called faith? Or a strict and regular attendance on any kind
of external worship? O no! Were this all that it implied, Christianity
were indeed a poor, empty, shallow thing: such as none but half-
thinkers could admire, and all who think freely and generously must
despise. But this is not the case: the spirit above described, this
alone, is Christianity. And if so, it is no wonder, that even a
celebrated unbeliever should make that frank declaration, “Well, after
all, these Christian dogs, are the happiest fellows upon earth!”
Indeed they are. Nay, we may say more. They are the only happy
men upon earth: and that tho’ we should have no regard at all to the
particular circumstances above-mentioned. Suppose there was no
such thing as a comet in the universe, or none that would ever
approach the solar system; suppose there had never been an
earthquake in the world, or that we were assured there never would
be another: yet what advantage has a Christian (I mean always a
real, scriptural Christian) above all other men upon earth?

What advantage has he over you in particular, if you do not

believe the Christian system? For suppose you have utterly driven
away storms, lightnings, earthquakes, comets, yet there is another
grim enemy at the door; and you cannot drive him away, it is death.
“O that death (said a gentleman of large possessions, of good
health, and a chearful natural temper) I do not love to think of it! it
comes in and spoils all.” So it does indeed. It comes with its
“miscreated front,” and spoils all your mirth, diversions, pleasures! It
turns all into the silence of a tomb, into rottenness and dust. And
many times it will not stay till the trembling hand of old age beckons
to it: but it leaps upon you, while you are in the dawn of life, in the
bloom and strength of your years.
 “The morning flowers display their sweets,

And gay their silken leaves unfold,

Unmindful of the noon-tide heats,

And fearless of the evening cold.

Nipp’d by the wind’s unkindly blast,

Parch’d by the sun’s directer ray

The momentary glories waste,

The short-liv’d beauties die away.”

And where are you then? Does your soul disperse and dissolve into
common air? Or does it share the fate of its former companion, and
moulder into dust! Or does it remain conscious of its own existence,
in some distant, unknown world? ’Tis all unknown! A black, dreary,
melancholy scene! Clouds and darkness rest upon it.

But the case is far otherwise with a Christian. To him life and
immortality are brought to light. His eye pierces through the vale of
the shadow of death, and sees into the glories of eternity. His view
does not terminate on that black line,

“The verge ’twixt mortal and immortal being.”

But extends beyond the bounds of time and place, to the house of
God eternal in the heavens. Hence he is so far from looking upon
death as an enemy, that he longs to feel his welcome embrace. He
groans (but they are pleasing groans) to have mortality swallowed up
of life.

Perhaps you will say, “But this is all a dream. He is only in a fool’s
paradise?” Supposing he be, it is a pleasing dream.
Maneat mentis gratissimus error!
If he is only in a fool’s paradise, yet it is a paradise, while you are
wandering in a wide, weary, barren world. Be it folly: his folly gives
him that present happiness, which all your wisdom cannot find. So
that he may now turn tables upon you and say,

“Whoe’er can ease by folly get,

With safety may despise

The wretched, unenjoying wit,

The miserable wise.

Such unspeakable advantage (even if there is none beyond death)

has a Christian over an Infidel! It is true, he has given up some
pleasures before he could attain to this. But what pleasures? That of
eating till he is sick: till he weakens a strong, or quite destroys a
weak constitution. He has given up the pleasure of drinking a man
into a beast, and that of ranging from one worthless creature to
another, till he brings a canker upon his estate, and perhaps
rottenness into his bones. But in lieu of these, he has now (whatever
may be hereafter) a continual serenity of mind, a constant evenness
and composure of temper, a peace which passeth all understanding.
He has learnt in every state wherein he is, therewith to be content:
nay, to give thanks, as being clearly persuaded, it is better for him
than any other. He feels continual gratitude to his Supreme
Benefactor, Father of Spirits, Parent of Good; and tender,
disinterested benevolence to all the children of this common Father.
May the Father of your spirit, and the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, make you such a Christian! May he work in your soul a divine
conviction of things not discerned by eyes of flesh and blood! May he
give you to see him that is invisible, and to taste of the powers of the
world to come; may he fill you with all peace and joy in believing, that
you may be happy in life, in death, in eternity!
 A COLLECTION OF

F O R M S of P R A Y E R,
For every day in the week.

First printed in the year 1733.

S U N D A Y M O R N I N G.
A LMIGHTY God, Father of all mercies, I thy unworthy servant
desire to present myself, with all humility, before thee, to offer
my morning sacrifice of love and thanksgiving! Glory be to thee, O
most adorable Father, who after thou hadst finished the work of
creation, enteredst into thy eternal rest. Glory be to thee, O holy
Jesus, who having thro’ the eternal Spirit offered thy self a full,
perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, didst
rise again the third day from the dead, and hadst all power given
thee both in heaven and on earth. Glory be to thee, O blessed Spirit,
who proceeding from the Father and the Son, didst come down in
fiery tongues on the apostles on the first day of the week, and didst
enable them to preach the glad tidings of salvation to a sinful world,
and hast ever since been moving on the faces of men’s souls, as
thou didst once on the face of the great deep, bringing them out of
that dark chaos in which they were involved. Glory be to thee, O
holy, undivided Trinity, for jointly concurring in the great work of our
redemption, and restoring us again to the glorious liberty of the sons
of God. Glory be to thee, who in compassion to human weakness,
hast appointed a solemn day for the remembrance of thy inestimable
benefits. O let me ever esteem it my privilege and happiness, to
have a day set apart for the concerns of my soul, a day free from
distractions, disengaged from the world, wherein I have nothing to do
but to praise and love thee. O let it ever be to me a day sacred to
divine love, a day of heavenly rest and refreshment.
 Let thy holy Spirit, who on the first day of the week descended in
miraculous gifts on thy apostles, descend on me thy unworthy
servant, that I may be always in the spirit on the Lord’s day. Let his
blessed inspiration prevent and assist me in all the duties of this thy
sacred day, that my wandring thoughts may all be fixed on thee, my
tumultuous affections composed, and my flat and cold desires
quickned into fervent longings and thirstings after thee. O let me join
in the prayers and praises of thy church with ardent and heavenly
affection, hear thy word with earnest attention and a fixed resolution
to obey it. And when I approach thy altar, pour into my heart humility,
faith, hope, love, and all those holy dispositions, which become the
solemn remembrance of a crucified Saviour. Let me employ this
whole day to the ends for which it was ordained, in works of
necessity and mercy, in prayer, praise, and meditation; and let the
words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart be always
acceptable in thy sight.

I know, O Lord that thou hast commanded me, and therefore it is

my duty, to love thee with all my heart, and with all my strength. I
know thou art infinitely holy and overflowing in all perfection, and
therefore it is my duty so to love thee.

I know thou hast created me, and that I have neither being nor
blessing but what is the effect of thy power and goodness.

I know thou art the end for which I was created, and that I can
expect no happiness but in thee.

I know that in love to me, being lost in sin, thou didst send thy
only Son, and that he being the Lord of glory, did humble himself to
the death upon the cross, that I might be raised to glory.

I know thou hast provided me with all necessary helps for

carrying me through this life to that eternal glory, and this out of the
excess of thy pure mercy to me, unworthy of all mercies.
 I know thou hast promised to be thyself my exceeding great
reward. Though it is thou alone who thyself workest in me, both to
will and to do, of thy good pleasure.

Upon these and many other titles, I confess it is my duty, to love

thee my God, with all my heart. Give thy strength unto thy servant,
that thy love may fill my heart, and be the motive of all the use I
make of my understanding, my affections, my senses, my health, my
time, and whatever other talents I have received from thee. Let this,
O God, rule my heart, without a rival: let it dispose all my thoughts,
words, and works; and thus only can I fulfil my duty and thy
command, of loving thee with all my heart, and mind, and soul, and
strength.

O thou infinite goodness, confirm thy past mercies to me, by

enabling me for what remains of my life, to be more faithful than I
have hitherto been, to this thy great command. For the time I have
yet to sojourn upon earth, O let me fulfil this great duty. Permit me
not to be in any delusion here: let me not trust in words, or sighs, or
tears, but love thee even as thou hast commanded. Let me feel, and
then I shall know what it is, to love thee with all my heart.

O merciful God, whatsoever thou deniest me, deny me not this

love. Save me from the idolatry of loving the world, or any of the
things of the world. Let me never love any creature, but for thy sake,
and in subordination to thy love. Take thou the full possession of my
heart, raise there thy throne, and command there, as thou dost in
heaven. Being created by thee, let me live to thee; being created for
thee, let me ever act for thy glory; being redeemed by thee, let me
render unto thee what is thine, and let my spirit ever cleave to thee
alone!
 Let the prayers and sacrifices of thy holy church offered unto thee
this day, be graciously accepted; cloath thy priests with
righteousness, and pardon all thy people who are not prepared
according to the preparation of the sanctuary. Prosper all those who
are sincerely engaged in propagating or promoting thy faith and love
(――) ¹: Give thy Son the Heathen for his inheritance, and the utmost
parts of the earth for his possession: that from the rising up of the
sun unto the going down of the same, thy name may be great among
the Gentiles. Enable us of this nation, and especially those whom
thou hast set over us in church and state, in our several stations, to
serve thee in all holiness, and to know the love of Christ which
passeth knowledge. Continue to us the means of grace, and grant
we may never provoke thee by our non-improvement to deprive us of
them. Pour down thy blessing upon our universities, that they may
ever promote true religion and sound learning. Shew mercy, O Lord,
to my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, to all my friends
(――) ¹ relations and enemies, and to all that are in affliction. Let thy
fatherly hand be over them, and thy holy Spirit ever with them; that
submitting themselves entirely to thy will, and directing all their
thoughts, words and works to thy glory, they and those that are
already dead in the Lord, may at length enjoy thee, in the glories of
thy kingdom, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth
with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for ever.

¹ Here mention the particular persons you would pray for.

S U N D A Y E V E N I N G.

General questions which a serious Christian may propose to himself,

before he begins his evening devotions.

1. With what degree of attention and fervour did I use my morning

prayers, public or private?
 2. Have I done any thing without a present, or at least a previous
perception of its direct, or remote tendency to the glory of God?

3. Did I in the morning consider, what particular virtue I was to

exercise, and what business I had to do in the day?

4. Have I been zealous to undertake, and active in doing what

good I could?

5. Have I interested myself any farther in the affairs of others,

than charity required?

6. Have I, before I visited, or was visited, considered how I might

thereby give or receive improvement?

7. Have I mentioned any failing or fault of any man, when it was

not necessary for the good of another?

8. Have I ♦unnecessarily grieved any one by word or deed?

♦ “necessarily” replaced with “unnecessarily” per Errata

9. Have I before, or in every action considered, how it might be a

means of improving in the virtue of the day?

Particular questions relative to the love of God.

1. Have I set apart some of this day, to think upon his perfections
and mercies?

2. Have I laboured to make this day, a day of heavenly rest,

sacred to divine love?

3. Have I employed those parts of it in works of necessity and

mercy, which were not employed in prayer, reading, and meditation?
MY Father, my God, I am in thy hand; and may I rejoice above all
things in being so: do with me what seemeth good in thy

O sight: only let me love thee with all my mind, soul, and
strength.

I magnify thee for granting me to be born in thy church, and of

religious parents; for washing me in thy baptism, and instructing me
in thy doctrine of truth and holiness; for sustaining me by thy
gracious providence, and guiding me by thy blessed Spirit; for
admitting me, with the rest of my Christian brethren, to wait on thee
at thy public worship: and for so often feeding my soul with thy most
precious body and blood, those pledges of love, and sure
conveyances of strength and comfort. O be gracious unto all of us,
whom thou hast this day [or at any time] admitted to thy holy table.
Strengthen our hearts in thy ways against all our temptations, and
make us more than conquerors in thy love.

O my Father, my God, deliver me, I beseech thee, from all violent

passions: I know how greatly obstructive these are, both of the
knowledge and love of thee; O let none of them find a way into my
heart, but let me ever possess my soul in meekness. O my God, I
desire to fear them more than death; let me not serve these cruel
tyrants; but do thou reign in my breast; let me ever be thy servant
and love thee with all my heart.

Deliver me, O God, from too intense an application to even

necessary business. I know how this dissipates my thoughts from
the one end of all my business, and impairs that lively perception I
would ever retain of thee standing at my right-hand. I know the
narrowness of my heart, and that an eager attention to earthly things
leaves it no room for the things of heaven. O teach me to go through
all my employments with so truly disengaged a heart, that I may still
see thee in all things, and see thee therein as continually looking
upon me, and searching my reins; and that I may never impair that
liberty of spirit, which is necessary for the love of thee.
 Deliver me, O God, from a slothful mind, from all lukewarmness,
and all dejection of spirit: I know these cannot but deaden my love to
thee; mercifully free my heart from them, and give me a lively,
zealous, active and chearful spirit; that I may vigorously perform
whatever thou commandest, thankfully suffer whatever thou chusest
for me, and be ever ardent to obey in all things thy holy love.

Deliver me, O God, from all idolatrous love of any creature. I

know infinite numbers have been lost to thee, by loving those
creatures for their own sake, which thou permittest, nay, even
commandest to love subordinately to thee. Preserve me, I beseech
thee, from all such blind affection: be thou a guard to all my desires,
that they fix on no creature any farther than the love of it tends to
build me up in the love of thee. Thou requirest me to love thee with
all my heart: Undertake for me, I beseech thee, and be thou my
security, that I may never open my heart to any thing, but out of love
to thee.

Above all, deliver me, O my God, from all idolatrous self-love. I

know, O God (blessed be thy infinite mercy for giving me this
knowledge) that this is the root of all evil. I know, thou madest me,
not to do my own will but thine. I know, the very corruption of the
devil is, the having a will contrary to thine. O be thou my helper
against this most dangerous of all idols, that I may both discern all its
subtleties, and withstand all its force. O thou who hast commanded
me to renounce myself, give me strength, and I will obey thy
command. My choice and desire is, to love myself, as all other
creatures, in and for thee. O let thy almighty arm so stablish,
strengthen and settle me, that thou mayst ever be the ground and
pillar of all my love.

By this love of thee, my God, may my soul, be fixed against its

natural inconstancy: by this may it be reduced to an entire
indifference as to all things else, and simply desire what is pleasing
in thy sight. May this holy flame ever warm my breast, that I may
serve thee with all my might; and let it consume in my heart all
selfish desires that I may in all things regard, not myself but thee.
 O my God, let thy glorious name be duly honoured and loved by
all the creatures which thou hast made. Let thy infinite goodness and
greatness be ever adored by all angels and men. May thy church,
the Catholic seminary of divine love, be protected from all the
powers of darkness. O vouchsafe to all, who call themselves by thy
name, one short glimpse of thy goodness. May they once taste and
see how gracious thou art, that all things else may be tasteless to
them; that their desires may be always flying up towards thee, that
they may render thee love, and praise, and obedience pure and
chearful, constant and zealous, universal and uniform, like that the
holy angels render thee in heaven.

Send forth thy blessed Spirit into the midst of these sinful nations,
and make us a holy people: stir up the heart of our sovereign, of the
royal family, of the clergy, the nobility, and of all whom thou hast set
over us, that they may be happy instruments in thy hand, of
promoting this good work: be gracious to the universities, to the
gentry and commons of this land, and comfort all that are in affliction;
let the trial of their faith work patience in them, and perfect them in
hope and love (――). ¹

¹ Here mention the particular persons you would pray for.

Bless my father, &c. my friends and relations, and all that belong
to this family; all that have been instrumental to my good, by their
assistance, advice, example, or writing, and all that do not pray for
themselves.

Change the hearts of mine enemies, and give me grace to forgive

them, even as thou for Christ’s sake forgivest us.
 O thou Shepherd of Israel, vouchsafe to receive me this night
and ever, into thy protection; accept my poor services, and pardon
the sinfulness of these and all my holy duties. O let it be thy good
pleasure shortly to put a period to sin and misery, to infirmity and
death, to compleat the number of thine elect, and to hasten thy
kingdom; that we, and all that wait for thy salvation, may eternally
love and praise thee, O God the Father, God the Son, and God the
Holy Ghost, throughout all ages, world without end.

Our Father, &c.

M O N D A Y M O R N I N G.

General questions, which may be used every morning.

Did I think of God first and last?

Have I examined myself how I behaved since last night’s

retirement?

Am I resolved to do all the good I can this day, and to be diligent

in the business of my calling?
O GOD, who art the giver of all good gifts, I thy unworthy servant,
entirely desire to praise thy name for all the expressions of
thy bounty towards me. Blessed be thy love for giving thy Son to die
for our sins, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.
Blessed be thy love for all the temporal benefits which thou hast with
a liberal hand poured out upon me; for my health and strength, food
and raiment, and all other necessaries with which thou hast provided
thy sinful servant. I also bless thee that, after all my refusals of thy
grace, thou still hast patience with me, hast preserved me this night,
(――) ¹ and given me yet another day, to renew and perfect my
repentance. Pardon, good Lord, all my former sins, and make me
every day more zealous and diligent to improve every opportunity of
building up my soul in thy faith, and love, and obedience: make
thyself always present to my mind, and let thy love fill and rule my
soul, in all those places, and companies, and employments, to which
thou callest me this day. In all my passage through this world, suffer
not my heart to be set upon it: but always fix my single eye, and my
undivided affections on the prize of my high calling! This one thing let
me do; let me so press toward this, as to make all things else
minister unto it; and be careful so to use them, as thereby to fit my
soul for that pure bliss, which thou hast prepared for those that love
thee!

¹ Here you may mention any particular mercy received.

 O thou, who art good and dost good, who extendest thy loving-
kindness to all mankind, the work of thine hands, thine image,
capable of knowing and loving thee eternally: suffer me to exclude
none, O Lord, from my charity, who are the objects of thy mercy; but
let me treat all my neighbours with that tender love, which is due to
thy servants and to thy children. Thou hast required this mark of my
love to thee: O let no temptation expose me to ingratitude, or make
me forfeit thy loving kindness which is better than life itself! But grant
that I may assist all my brethren with my prayers, where I cannot
reach them with actual services. Make me zealous to embrace all
occasions that may administer to their happiness, by assisting the
needy, protecting the oppressed, instructing the ignorant, confirming
the wavering, exhorting the good, and reproving the wicked. Let me
look upon the failings of my neighbour as if they were my own; that I
may be grieved for them, that I may never reveal them but when
charity requires, and then with tenderness and compassion. Let thy
love to me, O blessed Saviour, be the pattern of my love to him.
Thou thoughtest nothing too dear to part with, to rescue me from
eternal misery: O let me think nothing too dear to part with to set
forward the everlasting good of my fellow Christians. They are
members of thy body; therefore I will cherish them. Thou hast
redeemed them with an inestimable price; assisted by thy holy Spirit,
therefore I will endeavour to recover them from a state of
destruction: that thus adorning thy holy gospel, by doing good
according to my power, I may at last be received into the
endearments of thy eternal love, and sing everlasting praise unto the
Lamb, that was slain and sitteth on the throne for ever.
 Extend, I humbly beseech thee, thy mercy to all men, and let
them become thy faithful servants. Let all Christians live up to the
holy religion they profess; especially these sinful nations. Be
intreated for us, good Lord; be glorified by our reformation, and not
by our destruction. Turn thou us, and so shall we be turned: O be
favourable to thy people; give us grace to put a period to our
provocations, and do thou put a period to our punishment. Defend
our church from schism, heresy, and sacrilege, and the king from all
treasons and conspiracies. Bless all bishops, priests and deacons,
with apostolical graces, exemplary lives, and sound doctrine. Grant
to the council wisdom from above, to all magistrates integrity and
zeal, to the universities quietness and industry, and to the gentry and
commons, pious and peaceable, and loyal hearts.

Preserve my parents, my brothers and sisters, my friends and

relations, and all mankind, in their souls and bodies (――) ¹. Forgive
mine enemies, and in thy due time make them kindly affected
towards me. Have mercy on all who are afflicted in mind, body, or
estate: give them patience under their sufferings, and a happy issue
out of all their afflictions. O grant that we, with those who are already
dead in thy faith and fear may together partake of a joyful
resurrection, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the
Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.

¹ Here mention the particular persons you would pray for.

M O N D A Y E V E N I N G.

Particular questions relating to the love of our neighbour.

1. Have I thought any thing but my conscience, too dear to part

with, to please or serve my neighbour?

2. Have I rejoiced or grieved with him?

 3. Have I received his infirmities with pity, not with anger?

4. Have I contradicted any one, either where I had no good end in

view, or where there was no probability of convincing?

5. Have I let him, I thought in the wrong (in a ♦trifle) have the last
word?

♦ “triflle” replaced with “trifle”

M OST great and glorious Lord God, I desire to prostrate myself

before thy divine Majesty, under a deep sense of my
unworthiness, and with sorrow, and shame, and confusion of face, to
confess I have, by my manifold transgressions, deserved thy
severest visitations, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and am
no more worthy to be called thy son: O let thy paternal bowels yern
upon me, and for Jesus Christ’s sake graciously receive me. Accept
my imperfect repentance, and send thy Spirit of adoption into my
heart, that I may again be owned by thee, call thee Father, and share
in the blessings of thy children.

Adored be thy goodness for all the benefits thou hast already
from time to time bestowed on me: for the good things of this life,
and the hope of eternal happiness. Particularly, I offer to thee my
humblest thanks for thy preservation of me this day, (――) ¹. If I have
escaped any sin, it is the effect of thy restraining grace: if I have
avoided any danger, it was thy hand directed me. To thy holy name
be ascribed the honour and glory. O let the sense of all thy blessings
have this effect upon me, to make me daily more diligent in devoting
myself, all I am, and all I have to thy glory.

¹ Here mention the particular persons you would pray for.