Published papers

This article deals with the concept of "development" in Norbert Elias' sociological thought. Elias claims that his sociological approach is both "figurational" and "developmental", but most critiques of his approach focus mainly on the former and do not give much attention on the latter. It seems no wonder that the concept of "development" is pushed to the back ground, when we know that the concept has associations with nineteenth-century evolutionism and belief in progress. However, we realize we cannot dismiss the importance of the concept when we notice the fact that Elias attempted many times to refine the concept of "development" so that it could be regarded as scientific. What makes us curious then is that although he tried so hard to refine the concept, he could never give a satisfactory definition to it. Then why did he try so hard to keep the concept? And why couldn't he finally give a satisfactory definition to it? To answer these questions, I examine both Elias' explanation of the concept in his theoretical discussions and his description of historical processes in his "theoretical-empirical" works such as The Civilizing Process, and conclude that there are two different epistemological positions on which he stands when he talks of "development". Elias always took an empirical point of view and could never get out of this epistemological horizon when he tried to explain the concept. But on the other hand, he already got out of the empiricism and reached a new epistemological horizon when he practiced the description of historical processes. The new epistemological horizon is found to be the same as the one to which Michel Foucault's genealogy belongs, a totally new approach on history compared with the usual approach called empiricism = historicism.

The flâneur in Benjamin has often been thought of as an "observer." Yet there is another aspect of the flâneur in Benjamin, which is intoxicated, without mastery of the subject and without a clear boundary between the self and the other. In order to focus on this experience of the intoxication of the flâneur, this article deals with one of the figures which cause said intoxication, namely the whore. According to Benjamin, the figure of the whore is a peculiar allegory of modernity, "the life which signifies death," which embodies the character of commodity in the extreme. However, exactly what Benjamin means when referring to "death" is not clear. A suitable clue to trace the hidden meaning of "death" in Benjamin's thought is the figure of the doll, which has a close connection with the whore. Considering the figure of the doll, Benjamin addresses a fetishism that includes a factor of sadism, a fetishism that succumbs to the sex-appeal of the inorganic. This idea corresponds closely with the notion of a compulsive recurrence of the death drive in Freud's "The Uncanny." In conclusion, it is suggested that the secret of the figure of the whore resides in the dangerous quality of revealing the deadly purpose of eros, and "the life which signifies death" is nothing hut the allegorical figure which exposes the death drive. Seduced by the ambiguous attraction of the whore, the flâneur dissolves into an impersonal being, intoxicated, through the recurrence of this fundamental drive.