Journal essays by Maria Margaroni
Invocations of the Tragic: A Glossary for Critical Theory , 2023
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Ed. Athina Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis
Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2023
This essay proposes to critically engage with dominant materialist and narrative models of human ... more This essay proposes to critically engage with dominant materialist and narrative models of human identity, addressing the old, 'tired' question of subjectivity from a twenty-first century perspective. Drawing on contemporary neuroscientific theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I aim to read Charles Fernyhough's A Box of Birds (2012) as a creative reflection on the nature of memory, consciousness and the unconscious. As I shall demonstrate, what lies at the heart of Fernyhough's reflection is the Platonic allegory of the mind as an aviary. Taken up and re-interpreted by different characters in the novel, this allegory permits Fernyhough to experiment with contemporary discourses of neuro-subjectivity, tracing a richer, more dynamic relation among mind, brain and body.
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2008
Hypatia, 2005
The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora by reinscribing it ... more The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora by reinscribing it as an intervention in the context of two important postmodern debates.
The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of “the beginning before the
Beginning.” The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between
incommensurable entities: the “demonic” and the social, desire and the Law, material
production and representation. 1 contend: (I) that the introduction of the chora
in RPL is part of Kristeva’s effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of
the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato’s Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows
her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva’s
part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our
transcendence to the “demonic” lies less “beyond us” than “in-between.”
European Journal of English Studies, 2005
By Maria Margaroni and Effie Yiannopoulou
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2007
Women: A Cultural Review, 2007
European Journal of English Studies, 1997
On 15 July 1994 the Times Literary Supplement devoted a whole issue to the question of critical t... more On 15 July 1994 the Times Literary Supplement devoted a whole issue to the question of critical theory, its contribution to the area of literature and its future (pp. 3-14). The title of this issue, 'Critical Theory Now', laid the emphasis on the present state of literary theory after more than twenty-in fact, almost thirty-years of 'official existence'. What could hardly be ignored in this issue was a growing anxiety on the part of a large number of critics concerning theory's inflated interest in and projection of itself; in other words, to adopt a term popular with some of its detractors, its narcissism. 1 In his painting of Narcissus (Figure 1), Cigoli offers an eloquent picture of the most familiar version of the myth. Lying on his side next to a thin, hardly perceptible line which fails to keep the two levels of the painting (reality and its representation) distinct, Narcissus is already at-sorbed, swallowed away 1 from reality and the objective other, the dim figure of Echo in the painting, who, though captured in a desire to rush forward, to invade Narcissus's hermetically subjective and self-reflective space, seems to be retreating more and more into the background. His gaze, hidden
Philosophy Today, May 1, 2012
Camera Obscura 53, 18.2, 2003
Cincinnati Romance Review 35, 2013
This essay constitutes an attempt to situate Kristeva within the long dialectical tradition (from... more This essay constitutes an attempt to situate Kristeva within the long dialectical tradition (from Hegel to Sartre) that not only opposes thought to any form of dualism but, more importantly, has systematically defined the event of thinking in terms of the "historical, loveful violence" that characterizes any mediating process (Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle 241). Comparing her approach to language and being with those of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, my aim is to argue that thought in Kristeva is the life-enhancing encounter between the pathos of the negative (qua revolt, questioning, irony, critique, displacement, destabilization) and the ethos of sublimation (understood as the "patience" of knowing, the infinity of meaning, "the dignity of Beauty"[Kristeva, Intimate Revolt 251 and Sense and NonSense 7]). As I shall demonstrate, it is through this encounter that a passage, an enabling economy of relations, can open up between the suffering of the immanent (flesh or bare life), the transcendence of every singular "I," and the community held together by the sharing of the sign. Résumé: Cet essai tente de situer Kristeva dans la longue tradition dialectique (de Hegel à Sartre) qui non seulement oppose la pensée à toute forme de dualisme mais, de façon plus importante, définit systématiquement l'acte de penser en relation avec la "violence historique, aimante" qui caractérise tout processus de mediation (Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle 241). En comparant son approche du langage et de l'être avec celles de Jacques Derrida et de Giorgio Agamben, mon objectif est d'arguer que la pensée chez Kristeva est l'expérience enrichissante d'une rencontre, d'un face-à face, entre le pathos du négatif (qua révolte, interrogation, ironie, critique, déplacement, déstabilisation) et l'ethos de sublimation (compris comme la "patience" du savoir, l'infini du sens, "la dignité de la Beauté" [Kristeva, Intimate Revolt 251 et Sense and NonSense 7]). Comme je le démontre, c'est à travers ce face-à-face qu'un passage, qu'une économie favorable de relations, peut s'ouvrir entre la souffrance de l'immanence (chair ou "vie nue"), la transcendance de tout "Je" singulier et la communauté liée par le partage du signe. Keywords: pathos of the negative-ethos of sublimation-thought-signifiance-experience-nobility of thought-Hegel-Derrida-Agamben-Desire in Language-Sense and NonSense Intimate Revolt-New Maladies of the Soul-La haine et le pardon
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy XXI.1, 2013
Studies in the Literary Imagination Vol. 47.1, 2014
Synthesis 1, 2009
It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very m... more It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very much to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more appealing to them.-Nietzsche, The Gay Science What has been termed the cognitive turn in metaphorology (namely, the discovery of the cognitive value of metaphor since I. A. Richards' 1936 groundbreaking book on rhetoric) has brought about an explosion of interest in metaphor even in disciplines traditionally hostile to it (i.e. the natural and social sciences). This explosion has been accompanied by a broadening of the meaning of metaphor and an increasing interrogation of the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning. Since the 1960s this interrogation has taken the form of a move towards a more archaic motility before/beyond the age of classificatory logic responsible, according to Hans-Georg Gadamer, for the opposition between the figurative and the literal (qtd. in Cooper 259). In this essay I intend to engage with two contemporary thinkers whose writings on metaphor I consider exemplary of this move, namely, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. In the first part of the essay I want to follow the steps both theorists take away from metaphor as the classical rhetorical trope. My task in this part will be to throw into relief the difference that renders both Kristeva and Derrida's articulations of metaphor difficult. The difficulty lies, as I shall argue, in appreciating what I shall call the reversive force at work in every motion, a force suggested by the prefix dis-/dif-shared by both difference and difficulty. If misreading is the index of carelessness in the face of precisely such a reversive force, [1] then the felicity of our conveyance through footsteps destined to remain ahead of us necessitates a commitment to a care-full reading that (following Maurice Blanchot) will take the risk of imagining the hand writing and the death (i.e. the promise, chance, fear of impossibility) that bears this hand along. [2] Paradoxically, for Blanchot this difficult reading is marked by an ease that we associate with happiness and innocence, for it opens itself joyfully as well as trustingly to the death borne by writing and "holds [it] in its turn" though (as Blanchot emphasizes) only in order to reverse it (precisely "through its ease"): i.e. in order to render the scandal of impossibility the very site for the unfolding of life (Holland 316). It is this happy innocence, this joyful beginning as if for the first time (without guilt or knowledge, without fear of harm, without praejudicium) that will determine my understanding of politics in the second part of the essay. My concern in this context will be to investigate the stakes of each theorist's pas au-delà: that is, their step beyond in the direction of a more archaic motility. If metaphoricalness lies at the core of what for Kristeva is the key postmodern epistemological question (i.e. "what is mobility, what is innovation?" Tales of Love 275), then what are the chances opened for the subject-in-language-and-history by each theoretical formulation of an other metaphor? Kristeva, Derrida and the Classical Philosophical Concept of Metaphor In their treatment of metaphor, both Derrida and Kristeva make clear that their attempt to raise the question of metaphor anew should not be interpreted as a naïve privileging of the concept, as it has traditionally been defined in rhetoric and philosophy. Indeed, they consciously situate their metaphorologies post Heidegger's firm relegation of metaphor to the realm of metaphysics. Drawing on Heidegger's discussion, they argue that the dependence of the philosophical concept of metaphor on the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible renders it the master-category of metaphysics, its very possibility as a movement of idealization meta ta physika (i.e. outside/beyond natural phenomena). At the same time, they draw attention to the indebtedness of the classical philosophical understanding of metaphor (since Aristotle's first systematic treatment of it) to the concept of resemblance or analogy. As Derrida suggests, it is not an accident that Aristotle's discussion of metaphor forms part of his treatise on mimesis that opens the Poetics. Situated thus, metaphor, like poetry, is perceived as an effect of doubling-the doubling by renaming of truth, nature, the proper or the name as proper-and of resemblance-the act of erasing the difference of the double in recognizing it as analogous (i.e. other and yet the same). This is, in fact, according to Derrida, what inscribes metaphor within Aristotle's ontological chain, a chain that binds naming
Books by Maria Margaroni
Continuum , 2004
by John Lechte and Maria Margaroni
Contents Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Maria Margaroni... more by John Lechte and Maria Margaroni
Contents Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Maria Margaroni and John Lechte
Chapter 1: The Semiotic Revolution: Lost Causes, Uncomfortable Remainders, Binding Futures Maria Margaroni T
Chapter 2: The Trial of the Third: Kristeva's Oedipus and the Crisis of Identification Maria Margaroni
Chapter 3: Love and Death by Any Other Name... (On Love and Melancholia) John Lechte
Chapter 4: Violence, Ethics and Transcendence: Kristeva and Levinas John Lechte
Chapter 5: The Imaginary and the Spectacle: Kristeva's View John Lechte
Interview: Sharing Singularity
Bibliography
Index
Uploads
Journal essays by Maria Margaroni
The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of “the beginning before the
Beginning.” The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between
incommensurable entities: the “demonic” and the social, desire and the Law, material
production and representation. 1 contend: (I) that the introduction of the chora
in RPL is part of Kristeva’s effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of
the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato’s Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows
her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva’s
part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our
transcendence to the “demonic” lies less “beyond us” than “in-between.”
Books by Maria Margaroni
Contents Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Maria Margaroni and John Lechte
Chapter 1: The Semiotic Revolution: Lost Causes, Uncomfortable Remainders, Binding Futures Maria Margaroni T
Chapter 2: The Trial of the Third: Kristeva's Oedipus and the Crisis of Identification Maria Margaroni
Chapter 3: Love and Death by Any Other Name... (On Love and Melancholia) John Lechte
Chapter 4: Violence, Ethics and Transcendence: Kristeva and Levinas John Lechte
Chapter 5: The Imaginary and the Spectacle: Kristeva's View John Lechte
Interview: Sharing Singularity
Bibliography
Index
The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of “the beginning before the
Beginning.” The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between
incommensurable entities: the “demonic” and the social, desire and the Law, material
production and representation. 1 contend: (I) that the introduction of the chora
in RPL is part of Kristeva’s effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of
the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato’s Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows
her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva’s
part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our
transcendence to the “demonic” lies less “beyond us” than “in-between.”
Contents Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Maria Margaroni and John Lechte
Chapter 1: The Semiotic Revolution: Lost Causes, Uncomfortable Remainders, Binding Futures Maria Margaroni T
Chapter 2: The Trial of the Third: Kristeva's Oedipus and the Crisis of Identification Maria Margaroni
Chapter 3: Love and Death by Any Other Name... (On Love and Melancholia) John Lechte
Chapter 4: Violence, Ethics and Transcendence: Kristeva and Levinas John Lechte
Chapter 5: The Imaginary and the Spectacle: Kristeva's View John Lechte
Interview: Sharing Singularity
Bibliography
Index
Arleen Ionescu, Maria Margaroni, Introduction
Part I: Holocaust Trauma and the Ambivalence of Healing: Irreverent Takes
1. Ivan Callus (University of Malta), Unfamiliar Healing: Reconsidering the Fragment in Narratives of Holocaust Trauma
2. Arleen Ionescu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Forgiving as Self-Healing? The Case of Eva Mozes Kor
3. Lucia Ispas (University of Ploiești), (Mis)Representing Trauma through Humour: Roberto Benigniʼs La vita è bella
Part II: Mass Trauma, Art and the Healing Politics of Place
4. Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam), Improving Public Space: Trauma Art and Retrospective-Futuristic Healing
5. Ernst van Alphen (University of Leiden), Transforming Trauma into Memory
6. Radhika Mohanram (Cardiff University), Textures of Indian Memories
7. Irene Scicluna (Cardiff University), How Do We Mourn? A Look at Makeshift Memorials
Part III: Intimate Healing
8. Laurent Milesi (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Literature between Antidote and Black Magic: The Autofiction of Chloé Delaume
9. Olga Michael (University of Central Lancashire, Cyprus), Queer Trauma, Paternal Loss, and Graphic Healing in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
10. Nicholas Chare (University of Montréal), Concrete Loss: Attesting to Trauma in Teresa Margolles’s Karla, Hilario Reyes Gallegos
11. Maria Margaroni (University of Cyprus), The Monstrosity of the New Wounded: Thinking Trauma, Survival and Resistance with Catherine Malabou and Julia Kristeva
'Arts of Healing is an extremely significant volume addressing a timely issue of great importance and so advancing current debates in the field. The international and eminent contributors bring together the most contemporary theoretical and philosophical approaches, challenging literary and cultural texts and a range of traumatic events in global history in order to investigate the possibilities of cultural healing and articulate, without passing over suffering, ideas of "speaking anew"'.-ROBERT E AGLESTONE, Royal Holloway, University of London
'In this all-too-timely collection, Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni have assembled essays that thoughtfully draw upon the critical resources of the humanities to reflect on the conditions and limits of old as well as new arts of healing. As they follow through on the editors' commitment to move beyond a general concept of trauma, the richly diverse perspectives represented in this volume crucially challenge commonplace notions of healing as an individual, communal, or national redemption of a lost sense of wholeness and sovereignty, thereby mapping a freshly futural orientation for trauma studies'.-K ARYN BALL, University of Alberta
'Giving up the overgeneralised concept of trauma, the contributors to this intriguing volume carefully investigate particular geopolitical, social and cultural contexts of individual and collective traumatic experiences. Whereas classical trauma studies emphasised these experiences' inaccessibility and unrepresentability, this book shifts attention to various possibilities and techniques of their healing'.-VL ADIMIR BITI, University of Vienna
Textual Layering: Contact, Historicity, Critique sets out to rethink our relation to textual tradition against the background of several contemporary developments, including the emergence of digital culture, the increasing spectacularization of psychic and social life, the renegotiation of historical thinking, and the precarious position of the theoretical humanities within academia. To this end, this volume reinvests in "layering," a concept currently used in a wide range of fields, including metaphor studies and linguistics, cybernetics, the social sciences, art, and architecture. Drawing on existing definitions of "layering," the chapters in this book return to and reappraise some of the most crucial concerns in the post-1960s theoretical scene: concerns over the strained interplay between writing and the body; textuality and history; critique, différance, and the feminine; and memory, trace, and the immemorial. The aim of the diverse-often polemical-analyses carried out in this volume is to reactivate the critical force of textual tradition today through a renewed appreciation of its historical embeddedness and its libidinal sources, as well as its complex economy of separation and contact, diachronicity and synchronicity, and (re)layering and de-layering. This collection will be of interest to scholars of continental philosophy, literary theory, gender studies, architecture, film and visual culture studies, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, post-colonial studies, and political and social theory.
Contributors: Frances Restuccia, John Lechte, Judith Wambacq, William Watkin, Micheal Beehler, Brendan Moran, Adnan Mahmutovic, Marios Constantinou, Gertrude Postl, Tina Chanter, S. K. Keltner, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, Elena Tzelepis.
The StoryPharm consortium publishes a call for 19 PhD fellowships within the training programme “Storytelling as Pharmakon in Premodernity and Beyond: Training the New Generation of Researchers in Health Humanities”. The fellowships are funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action – Doctoral Networks, Grant Agreement 101169114.
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