Inscriptions

- contemporary thinking on art, philosophy and psycho-analysis -
https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

**Title:** Editorial

**Author:** *Inscriptions*

**Section:** Editorial

**Keywords:** editorial; objectivism; subject; engagement; disability

Copyright © 2024 *Inscriptions*.

**Correspondence:** *Inscriptions*, e: inscriptions@tankebanen.no.

**Received:** 10 July, 2024.

**Accepted:** 11 July, 2024.

**Published:** 15 July, 2024.

**How to cite:** *Inscriptions*. Editorial. *Inscriptions* 7, no. 2 (July 2024): 107-107. https://doi.org/10.59391/inscriptions.v7i2.261.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Editorial

Is it possible to obtain *objective* knowledge of
the social world? This question has plagued
philosophy at least since Immanuel Kant made
a distinction between the *phenomena* we expe-
rience and the *noumena* or the things in them-
selves, as formulated in *Critique of Pure Reason*
in 1781. In the thought of Pierre Bourdieu,
this distinction took on an even more acute
character. Hitherto, Bourdieu claimed in *Médi-
tations Pascaliennes* (1997), ethnographers and
social theorists had too often relied on a fully
conscious, rational and absolute subject “pro-
duced by the discourse on the human being.”
Nevertheless, the absolute, God-like charac-
ter of the knowing subject was doomed after
Kant: absolute knowledge is only possible for
a subject without limitations, which is not the
case for human subjects, who are limited in
our knowledge by our perceptive apparatus.
As Margrit Schildrick (2004) pointed out, au-
tonomous sovereign subjects, detached from
and prior to the social fields and conditions in
which they conduct research, are reliant on
an agency that precedes and acts on particular
contexts, rather than emerging from and being
immersed in them.

It is this notion of autonomous sovereignty
that comes under renewed critique in Philipp
Quell’s contribution in this issue of *Inscriptions*:
how can we, Quell asks, prepare the ground for
the emergence of “queer writing,” i.e., textual
expressions that rely on the context in which
academic expression occurs as the necessary
condition for its possibility? His answer is that
scholars must move beyond the idea of “pure
theory”: academic writing must abandon the
idea of an impartial and detached position and
fully embrace the messy post-colonial perspec-
tive according to which no single geographic
or scholastic position can claim universality.

The question of commitment on the side
of the scholar is also forcefully present in An-
drew Jorn's essay "Crip sovereignty: Bataille
and the ethics of wasting away." Jorn draws
on Georges Bataille's work to supplement crip
theory by asking how we can celebrate degra-
dation as a the *a priori* condition of a collective
commitment to preventing global catastrophic
suffering. This notion of degradation differs
radically from the one articulated by liberal dis-
ability studies. Thus, Jorn suggests that by shift-
ing the responsibility for transgression from
the individual onto society, we can move be-
yond an ideology of "celebration" associated
with the "indeterminacy" and "heterogeneity"
of the disabled person. Can a society that cele-
brates waste and uselessness give rise to a dif-
ferent kind of social responsibility?

In addition, based on their experience of the
El Eco museum and the *Black Water* art installa-
tion, David Habets, Julian Kiverstein, Erik Ri-
etveld, and Damiaan Denys ask if such sites can
engender an intimacy that is generative of self-
exploration and recognition. Showing how
experiences of art share characteristics with
therapy, Habets et al. propose that such expe-
riences carry with them the possibility of an
opening to confront difficult emotions and ex-
periences that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Therefore, the art-exposed person becomes a
knowing subject that is malleable, shifting, and
situated in specific contexts. As the authors
show, one scholastic path to recognising such
opportunities for subjective recalibration can
be found in the inclusion of personal and sub-
jective motifs in the act of academic writing.

*Inscriptions* is a peer-reviewed journal for
cross-disciplinary scholarship in philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and the arts. Support us by
purchasing our *print edition*.
Copyright © 2024 *Inscriptions*.

**Correspondence:** *Inscriptions*, e: inscriptions@tankebanen.no.

**How to cite:** *Inscriptions*. Editorial. *Inscriptions* 7, no. 2 (July 2024): 107-107.
https://doi.org/10.59391/inscriptions.v7i2.261.