Papers by Emily ShuHui Tsai
Journal of Cultural and Religious Studies, 2019
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Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 2018
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Philosophy Study, 2016
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Journal of Philosophy Study, 2020
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Tamkang Review, 1998
To converse is simultaneously to divert language from itself and to invite language to encounter ... more To converse is simultaneously to divert language from itself and to invite language to encounter an insurmountable obstacle of developing complete meanings. A signifier in flight in its infinite detour leads us to the threshold of the linguistic labyrinth and that renders writing itself disastrous. An otherness, a mythic stranger in silence, exists in language itself that forever opens up a void, a zero-point or a veiled outside that dominates language in self-destruction, in an utter catastrophe. From Blanchot's concept of writing, in his pursuit of this "empty" signifier, this otherness is sometimes a neutral void, or a creative force, and sometimes an evil power of death. It is a constitutive crack, a fissure that constitutes language itself in which the primordial signifier is forever missing. How we link this Blanchotian concept of the lost signifier with the Eastern concept of Dao (道) in Zhuangzi's philosophy will be the main discussion of this short paper. To Zhuangzi, language or any conceptualized idea is a great hindrance to Dao, which remains what I would like to term it as "a metonymic otherness" to language itself. A gesture of neutrality or a detachment from the "buzzing voices" of language would allow one to the silent horizon of Dao. This exterior void, a mute writing, conceals the whole consummation of self-knowledge, and the original reason or intelligence as spirit governs the body. Dao, an immobile exteriority containing the original reason beyond any empirical contemplation, certainly is quite different from the Blanchotian limit-experiences as encountering a pure form of the radical otherness when he gives Sade as an example. Zhuangzi's neutral point or the mute writing as otherness on the way to Dao will not turn out to be Sade’s pure reason of sadism. Thus, this exteriority as otherness finds its difference in Zhuangzi and Blanchot, despite their similarities.
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Journal of Philosophy Study, 2019
The images of the oceans often inspire us to take a poetic lift of the spirit for an escape fro... more The images of the oceans often inspire us to take a poetic lift of the spirit for an escape from the daily boredom or troubles related to the social restriction based on the ideological hierarchy. On the other hand, however, the collective human desires have no good ethics to discipline the insatiable enjoyment that has obviously damaged the environment and polluted the oceans. In this short paper, I focus on the concepts of the time event, Aion and Chronos, with the three poems related to the images of the oceans written by a Taiwanese poet, Hui Tong; I also try to understand how the origin of the water on our Earth comes from. In fact, our Earth has the “liquid” oceans on the surface and also the hidden “solid” oceans, the blue crystal rocks called ringwoodite, within Earth’s mantle. The oceans absorb heat and the tiny ocean plants called phytoplankton drifting with the oceanic currents produce oxygen through photosynthesis for the human health as well. But the contemporary environmental problem is that the chronic damages of the biodiversity by the human collective desires have affected the oceans to become seriously polluted. Therefore, we have the feelings of ambivalence toward the images of the oceans: tranquility, transience, creativity, oblivion or corruption and hostility for the human bad habits.
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中外文學 Chung Wai Literary, 1998
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The creative forces of affects are considered to be a mysterious power within our immanence. Alth... more The creative forces of affects are considered to be a mysterious power within our immanence. Although creators exist like lonely islands and may be more vulnerable to poor health, it is problematic to draw an inference that mental illness nourishes creativity. Artists, philosophers, and scientists have to struggle with chaos to create a new vision into their works. This paper argues that first, the creativity of affects is a mysterious power of our immanence, not nourished by pathology; second, the surreal images of curved and juxtaposed spaces by the artists resonate with the scientific experiments conducted by string physicists who propose the existence of multiverse with the possibility of 11-dimensional spaces. Therefore, the creators have shared the equally-important status as the singular beings in their different modes of lives. Deleuze's and Guattari's creative concepts of philosophy help improve the better understanding of the mysterious power of oceanic affects within our immanence. Thus, the general opinion that creativity and mental illness are infamously connected should be entirely re-questioned and reexamined .
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This short paper aims to discuss the unbearably-heavy weight of childhood memory and the survivor... more This short paper aims to discuss the unbearably-heavy weight of childhood memory and the survivor's guilt as the symptoms in the novel, The Kite Runner, published in 2003, by an Afghan-American writer, Khaled Hosseini. It describes the ambivalent relationship between the father and the son against the background of political turmoil in Afghanistan—how they have a good life together in Afghanistan and afterwards how they are forced to leave their homeland like refugees to Pakistan and then to The United States for a new life with the survivor's guilt after the tumultuous period of the Soviet military invasion. The narrator, Amir, treasures the memories of his old homeland, Afghanistan, the innermost remnants of his being, which has become as the specter haunting his present life in the United States. Amir has to return to his old homeland to meet his father's closest friend, Rahim Khan, and to rescue Sohrad, the son of his half-brother, Hassan, from the Taliban regime. This ethical return to the past not only has unfolded certain secrecy of his father's dishonor but also has healed his sense of survivor's guilt because of his evil rivalry of jealousy against Hassan to fully possess his father's love in his childhood. In my discussion of ethnic hierarchy and conflicts in Afghanistan described in the novel, Jacques Derrida's and Giorgio Agamben's theoretical concepts, such as the problematic of sovereignty, sovereign animality and bare life in The Beast & the Soveriegn and Homo Sacer, will be used to penetrate the deeper understanding of their traumatic past as haunting specters.
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Papers by Emily ShuHui Tsai
ecstasy of imagination as pieces of the cosmic art, such a touching gift suddenly given to me this year. Chances have arrived as the spiritual enlightenment. Though I am not a faithful believer of animism, I do feel surprised to discover that the clouds paintings focus more on animal figures as if the Muses, like the invisible curators in the sky, unpredictably present different artistic images within seconds and thanks to my old camera which could catch the fleeting beauty of mesmerizing images of the cosmic art in time, though sometimes, clouds take a good break from painting. Afterwards, I have become a faithful observer looking up to the sky, hoping for the sun to rise each morning. The beauty of Nature exists everywhere, including the sky which is like the Museum of ART for the imagination of the sun, the wind and the mysterious clouds.