The essays in this book treat the question of connectedness: of how the human subject connects or fails to connect to other human subjects and the nonhuman world. Productive relations with the world – with otherness in general – have been thwarted by the major current in Western thought emphasizing the disjunction between the thinking self and the world. Notable exemplifications of this tendency are the Cartesian assumption of an ontological gap between mind and non-mind, and the psychoanalytic argument for the external world’s foreignness (and always potential hostility) to the human subject. ... More

The essays in this book treat the question of connectedness: of how the human subject connects or fails to connect to other human subjects and the nonhuman world. Productive relations with the world – with otherness in general – have been thwarted by the major current in Western thought emphasizing the disjunction between the thinking self and the world. Notable exemplifications of this tendency are the Cartesian assumption of an ontological gap between mind and non-mind, and the psychoanalytic argument for the external world’s foreignness (and always potential hostility) to the human subject. This book studies versions of that antagonistic relation in film, sociological and philosophical theories, and literature. It asks why it has been so easy to emphasize the differential nature of otherness – as if we had perversely worked to subordinate the possibilities of exchange with otherness to a conflictive, often violent relation to difference. How can we resist such oppressive strategies? Chapters Four and Five argue for the essential oneness of being, for our intrinsic connectedness to otherness both external and internal to us. Chapter Four seeks to define the relational terms of an undivided mind, one in which present consciousness always includes past and unconscious thought. Chapter Five extends the notion of unitary being to the relation between our bodies and the universe. The book’s nondualistic relational argument concludes with the assertion (authorized by contemporary cosmological theory) of our extension now into a cosmic past. Ultimately res cogitans and res extensa are united in the oneness of cosmic being.