The unconscious (das Unbewusste; etymologically, that which is unknown) is a relatively modern co... more The unconscious (das Unbewusste; etymologically, that which is unknown) is a relatively modern concept that naturalized areas of the unknown previously explored by literature, mythology, and metaphysics. Each in their own domain, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, the three 'masters of suspicion' (according to Paul Ricoeur), debunked the hubristic claims of modern rational consciousness, exposing its social, existential and psychological grey zones. 1 Inspired by, yet critiquing humanity's confidence in the power of reason, their acknowledgement of the limits of the Enlightenment is emblematized in Freud's charting of the conflictual relations between the orderly ego and the unruly id. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud characterized the unconscious as 'inaccessible' and 'incomprehensible'. 2 Building on Freud's structural topology, several strands of psychoanalysis derived from Freud's structural topology have sought to expand on his discovery of the psyche's unconscious dimension, from Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Didier Anzieu, to Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, or Slavoj Žižek, among others. The impact of Freud's discovery has also been registered in trauma theory, by scholars such as Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dominick LaCapra, as well as in literary and film theorists of various persuasions. 3 In the wake of Shoshana Felman's epoch-making 1977 issue of Yale French Studies titled 'Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading Otherwise', 4 there have been many attempts to keep up the critical spirit of an alternative 'analysis' of literary texts.
Starting from Nicholas Zurbrugg’s dismissal of the negative ‘B-Effect’ in postmodernism, which he... more Starting from Nicholas Zurbrugg’s dismissal of the negative ‘B-Effect’ in postmodernism, which he associates with ‘Benjamin, Brecht, Beckett, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu’, this essay examines the common rationale behind convergent affirmations of a neutrality or minimalism, often mistaken for nihilism, at key junctures in the works of Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes, adding Maurice Blanchot as a critical link. The argument unfolds along a double axis: it first considers the formal role of ‘chatter’ or ‘idle speech’ and the fragment(ary in writing) in the three ‘B-writers’ before relating them to different constructions of temporality, such as the ‘future anterior’ and the après-coup, in their thematizations of ‘catastrophe’ and ‘disaster’ as indirect responses to personal or historical trauma and death. A brief concluding paragraph highlights how time’s suspensiveness leads to different forms of waiting across Barthes, Blanchot and Beckett.
The critical assumption behind this chapter is that The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark revo... more The critical assumption behind this chapter is that The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark revolves around scenes whose parallel wording turns them into fateful, ironic counterparts unbeknownst to the characters, as befits the essence of a tragedy.1 Most crucially, the play hinges on an ‘existential distance’ between Hamlet’s famous ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy and his less conspicuous inflection of the question of being as ‘Let be’ in the final scene, a dramatic philosophical twist that inevitably comes too late for its untimely hero. Between these two poles Hamlet repeatedly interrogates the significance of ‘(no)thing’, ‘being’ and ‘man’, among other ‘concepts’, implicit or explicit, whose germanity,2 that of the Wittenberg student of philosophy/theology and even ‘theory’3 in a play about brotherly duels, this essay proposes to investigate in order to read the hero’s tragic evolution as a shift from a Heideggerian problematic of being and existence to a Derridean qualification of ontology and substitution of ‘desistance’ instead. In a final move, or twist to the Renaissance drama, we shall enquire into the posthumous, as much as posthuman, nature of a tragedy famously known since Derrida’s Specters of Marx for its untimely effects of revenance by exhuming its ghostly dead in the light of Nicolas Abraham’s imaginary epilogue, ‘The Sixth Act’.
This interview with contemporary poet Andrei Codrescu, conducted over email, examines several con... more This interview with contemporary poet Andrei Codrescu, conducted over email, examines several contemporary meanings of 21 st -century poetry and poetics, the relevance of American poetry schools that dominated the latter half of the 20 th century, and effects of the posthumanistic turn on poetic discourse(s). It also asks whether the public condemnation of Russian culture in general is justified or not in the aftermath of the Russian aggression against Ukraine.
One hundred years ago T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, the acme of High Modernism (along wit... more One hundred years ago T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, the acme of High Modernism (along with Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and, for fiction, James Joyce's Ulysses, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Franz Kafka's composition of The Castle, to name but these), in which the poet articulated his response to post-WW1 disillusionment. 1 Five years before the appearance of Eliot's 'long poem', Ezra Pound, who will, ironically somewhat belatedly, utter his famous slogan 'make it new', 2 had begun serializing his Cantos in Poetry, an epic magnum opus which took him half a century to complete and cast a long shadow across the best of postmodern(ist) poetry, such as William Carlos Williams's Paterson (1946), 'a hodgepodge, the American version of Pound's more famous "ragbag"', 3 Charles Olson's own epic project of the Maximus Poems (1950-1970), and, more generally, much of the experimental poetic output of the second half of the 20 th century that still owed its aesthetic principles, however distantly, to an 'ideogrammic' method of composition. 4 Fast forward to our contemporary epoch and the (broadly defined) ethno-ethicalincluding in the sense of a localism, or ethos-and political re-anchoring of much post-WW2 (especially North American) poetry, in the wake of (inter alia) Olson's epochmaking castigation of the moral failure of Poundian aesthetics, but also ethnopoetics à la Jerome Rothenberg, which emphasized connections between human activity and the environment that produces it, continues to leave its indirect imprint on some of the latest poetic agendas. Witness trends such as 'poetry and the environment' (Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver), 'nature poetry', or a renewed tradition of 'ecopoetics'-a (re)opening of
Word and Text - A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics
This is a review article that discusses Timothy Yu (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First... more This is a review article that discusses Timothy Yu (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
The unconscious (das Unbewusste; etymologically, that which is unknown) is a relatively modern co... more The unconscious (das Unbewusste; etymologically, that which is unknown) is a relatively modern concept that naturalized areas of the unknown previously explored by literature, mythology, and metaphysics. Each in their own domain, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, the three 'masters of suspicion' (according to Paul Ricoeur), debunked the hubristic claims of modern rational consciousness, exposing its social, existential and psychological grey zones. 1 Inspired by, yet critiquing humanity's confidence in the power of reason, their acknowledgement of the limits of the Enlightenment is emblematized in Freud's charting of the conflictual relations between the orderly ego and the unruly id. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud characterized the unconscious as 'inaccessible' and 'incomprehensible'. 2 Building on Freud's structural topology, several strands of psychoanalysis derived from Freud's structural topology have sought to expand on his discovery of the psyche's unconscious dimension, from Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Didier Anzieu, to Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, or Slavoj Žižek, among others. The impact of Freud's discovery has also been registered in trauma theory, by scholars such as Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dominick LaCapra, as well as in literary and film theorists of various persuasions. 3 In the wake of Shoshana Felman's epoch-making 1977 issue of Yale French Studies titled 'Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading Otherwise', 4 there have been many attempts to keep up the critical spirit of an alternative 'analysis' of literary texts.
Starting from Nicholas Zurbrugg’s dismissal of the negative ‘B-Effect’ in postmodernism, which he... more Starting from Nicholas Zurbrugg’s dismissal of the negative ‘B-Effect’ in postmodernism, which he associates with ‘Benjamin, Brecht, Beckett, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu’, this essay examines the common rationale behind convergent affirmations of a neutrality or minimalism, often mistaken for nihilism, at key junctures in the works of Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes, adding Maurice Blanchot as a critical link. The argument unfolds along a double axis: it first considers the formal role of ‘chatter’ or ‘idle speech’ and the fragment(ary in writing) in the three ‘B-writers’ before relating them to different constructions of temporality, such as the ‘future anterior’ and the après-coup, in their thematizations of ‘catastrophe’ and ‘disaster’ as indirect responses to personal or historical trauma and death. A brief concluding paragraph highlights how time’s suspensiveness leads to different forms of waiting across Barthes, Blanchot and Beckett.
The critical assumption behind this chapter is that The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark revo... more The critical assumption behind this chapter is that The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark revolves around scenes whose parallel wording turns them into fateful, ironic counterparts unbeknownst to the characters, as befits the essence of a tragedy.1 Most crucially, the play hinges on an ‘existential distance’ between Hamlet’s famous ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy and his less conspicuous inflection of the question of being as ‘Let be’ in the final scene, a dramatic philosophical twist that inevitably comes too late for its untimely hero. Between these two poles Hamlet repeatedly interrogates the significance of ‘(no)thing’, ‘being’ and ‘man’, among other ‘concepts’, implicit or explicit, whose germanity,2 that of the Wittenberg student of philosophy/theology and even ‘theory’3 in a play about brotherly duels, this essay proposes to investigate in order to read the hero’s tragic evolution as a shift from a Heideggerian problematic of being and existence to a Derridean qualification of ontology and substitution of ‘desistance’ instead. In a final move, or twist to the Renaissance drama, we shall enquire into the posthumous, as much as posthuman, nature of a tragedy famously known since Derrida’s Specters of Marx for its untimely effects of revenance by exhuming its ghostly dead in the light of Nicolas Abraham’s imaginary epilogue, ‘The Sixth Act’.
This interview with contemporary poet Andrei Codrescu, conducted over email, examines several con... more This interview with contemporary poet Andrei Codrescu, conducted over email, examines several contemporary meanings of 21 st -century poetry and poetics, the relevance of American poetry schools that dominated the latter half of the 20 th century, and effects of the posthumanistic turn on poetic discourse(s). It also asks whether the public condemnation of Russian culture in general is justified or not in the aftermath of the Russian aggression against Ukraine.
One hundred years ago T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, the acme of High Modernism (along wit... more One hundred years ago T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, the acme of High Modernism (along with Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and, for fiction, James Joyce's Ulysses, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Franz Kafka's composition of The Castle, to name but these), in which the poet articulated his response to post-WW1 disillusionment. 1 Five years before the appearance of Eliot's 'long poem', Ezra Pound, who will, ironically somewhat belatedly, utter his famous slogan 'make it new', 2 had begun serializing his Cantos in Poetry, an epic magnum opus which took him half a century to complete and cast a long shadow across the best of postmodern(ist) poetry, such as William Carlos Williams's Paterson (1946), 'a hodgepodge, the American version of Pound's more famous "ragbag"', 3 Charles Olson's own epic project of the Maximus Poems (1950-1970), and, more generally, much of the experimental poetic output of the second half of the 20 th century that still owed its aesthetic principles, however distantly, to an 'ideogrammic' method of composition. 4 Fast forward to our contemporary epoch and the (broadly defined) ethno-ethicalincluding in the sense of a localism, or ethos-and political re-anchoring of much post-WW2 (especially North American) poetry, in the wake of (inter alia) Olson's epochmaking castigation of the moral failure of Poundian aesthetics, but also ethnopoetics à la Jerome Rothenberg, which emphasized connections between human activity and the environment that produces it, continues to leave its indirect imprint on some of the latest poetic agendas. Witness trends such as 'poetry and the environment' (Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver), 'nature poetry', or a renewed tradition of 'ecopoetics'-a (re)opening of
Word and Text - A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics
This is a review article that discusses Timothy Yu (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First... more This is a review article that discusses Timothy Yu (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Comment dit-on 'rire' en grec, en hellène ancien ou moderne? Ou plutôt, comment faiton rire, rire... more Comment dit-on 'rire' en grec, en hellène ancien ou moderne? Ou plutôt, comment faiton rire, rire à en perdre la tête, quand on s'appelle Hélène, prénom aux consonances destinales a priori tragiques, et que l'on veut réécrire le sort peu enviable de la créature mythique de l'Antiquité, cette Méduse décapitée, en une comédie -selon le fameux aphorisme de Marx pour qui l'histoire a lieu une première fois comme tragédie et se répète comme farce... ou 'pharces'? 1 Ironie, rironie, rire au nez, se payer notre tête; être médusé de rire, en fin de compte... Rire, en grec, c'est gelao, et geloiographia (lit.: écriture de ce qui fait rire) désigne une caricature -et 'Le Rire de la Méduse' n'en manque pas; par exemple 'l'idole aux couilles d'argile' (p. 53) -voire même un dessin animé. La moquerie, ou l'art de (faire) tourner en ridicule (geloios: ridicule), s'appelle, quant à elle, geloiopoiesi, soit une poétique, un savoir faire du rire. Car il s'agit bien d'un faire performatif et donc d'une poétique (de poiein: faire) dès l'ouverture du 'Rire de la Méduse', sous forme de manifeste: 'Je parlerai de l'écriture féminine: de ce qu'elle fera' ('RM', p. 37 -où l'on peut entendre en traduction en grec classique le futur poiesei: elle fera). Mais comment rit la Méduse cixousienne? Comment traduire son rire? Par exemple 'simplement' par un laughter ou bien, y ajoutant un tour justement moqueur, ce qui fut le choix judicieux de la traduction anglaise, par laugh: the laugh of the Medusa? Republié dans Le Rire de la Méduse et autres ironies quelques trente ans plus tard, 1 Hélène Cixous, Le Rire de la Méduse et autres ironies. Préface de Frédéric Regard (Paris: Galilée, 2010), p. 65. Ci-après abrégé en 'RM' dans le texte.
Money facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More than a mere medium of e... more Money facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More than a mere medium of exchange or a measure of value, it is the primary means by which we manifest a faith unique to our secular age. But what happens when individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit, ‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral terms? How should a theological critique of capitalism proceed today? With the effects of the 2008 economic crises continuing to be felt across the world, this volume brings some of the most important contemporary voices in philosophy, literature, theology, and critical and cultural theory together in one volume to assert the need to interrogate and broaden the terms of the theological critique of capitalism.
Table of Contents Introduction, Christopher John Müller and Aidan Tynan / Part I: Modernity and the Trajectories of Sovereignty / 1. The Ascendancy of Finance: Toward a concept of Seigniorial power, Joseph Vogl / 2. Hobbes, Sovereign Power and Money, Peter Sedgwick / 3. Accelerator despite Itself: Credo, Crisis, Katechon, Arthur Bradley / Part II: The Living Soul of Money / 4. The Bank of England in Ruins: Photography, Money and the Law of Equivalence, Christopher John Müller and Ian Wiblin / 5. Seeing is Believing: Looking at the gold standard, Nicky Marsh / 6. ‘Universal Shylockery: Money and Morality in The Merchant of Venice’, Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy / 7. ‘We are All Prostitutes’: Crisis and Libidinal Economy, Benjamin Noys / 8. The Materiality of Belief: On the Real Death of Mammon, Hollis Phelps / Part III: Speculation and Critique / 9. Impotent Signs: Money, Speculative Subjectivity, and the Ontological Proof, Aidan Tynan / 10. Speculation upon Speculation; or, a Contribution to the Critique of Philosophical Economy, Josh Robinson / 11. Believing in Deconstruction, Laurent Milesi / Part IV: Future Revelations / 12. Credit and Investment: A Matter of Faith, Philip Goodchild / 13. How Do We Know We Have a Future?, Richard Dienst / Acknowledgments / Notes on Contributors / Index
Uploads
Papers by Laurent Milesi
value, it is the primary means by which we manifest a faith unique to our secular age. But what happens when individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit, ‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral terms? How should a theological critique of capitalism proceed today? With the effects of the 2008 economic crises continuing to be felt across the world, this volume brings some of the most important contemporary voices in philosophy, literature, theology, and critical and cultural theory together in one volume to assert the need to interrogate and broaden the terms of the theological critique of capitalism.
Table of Contents Introduction, Christopher John Müller and Aidan Tynan / Part I: Modernity and the Trajectories of
Sovereignty / 1. The Ascendancy of Finance: Toward a concept of Seigniorial power, Joseph Vogl / 2. Hobbes, Sovereign
Power and Money, Peter Sedgwick / 3. Accelerator despite Itself: Credo, Crisis, Katechon, Arthur Bradley / Part II: The Living Soul of Money / 4. The Bank of England in Ruins: Photography, Money and the Law of Equivalence, Christopher John Müller and Ian Wiblin / 5. Seeing is Believing: Looking at the gold standard, Nicky Marsh / 6. ‘Universal Shylockery: Money and Morality in The Merchant of Venice’, Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy / 7. ‘We are All Prostitutes’: Crisis and Libidinal Economy, Benjamin Noys / 8. The Materiality of Belief: On the Real Death of Mammon, Hollis Phelps / Part III: Speculation and Critique / 9. Impotent Signs: Money, Speculative Subjectivity, and the Ontological Proof, Aidan Tynan / 10. Speculation upon Speculation; or, a Contribution to the Critique of Philosophical Economy, Josh Robinson / 11. Believing in Deconstruction, Laurent Milesi / Part IV: Future Revelations / 12. Credit and Investment: A Matter of Faith, Philip Goodchild / 13. How Do We Know We Have a Future?, Richard Dienst / Acknowledgments / Notes on Contributors / Index