From Basil Fawlty, The Little Tramp and Frank Spencer; to Jim Carey, Andy Kaufman and Rowan Atkinson... comedy characters and comic actors have proved useful lenses for exploring—and exposing—humor’s cultural and political significance. Both performing as well as chastising cultural values, ideas and beliefs, the comic character gives a unique insight into latent forms of social exclusion that, in many instances, can only ever be approached through the comic form. It is in examining this comic form that this paper (...) will consider how the ‘comedy character’ presents a unique, subversive significance. Drawing from Lacanian conceptions of the subject and television ‘sitcom’ examples, the emancipatory potential of the comedy character will be used to criticize the predominance of irony and satire in comic displays. Indeed, while funny, it will be argued that such comic examples underscore a deprivative cynicism within comedy and humor. Countering this, it will be argued that a Lacanian conception of the subject can profer a comic efficacy that not only reveals how our social orders are inherently inconsistent and open to subversive redefinition, but that these very inconsistencies are also echoed in the subject, and, in particular, the ‘true comedy character’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Marcia Muelder Eaton ANTHONY POWELL AND THE AESTHETIC LIFE Anthony POWELL'S work has been looked at carefully by relatively few critical scholars, in spite of the fact that he has been called "the most elegant writer presently working in the English language." ' I am surprised at how little he is read — at least in the United States. He is a splendid writer, often entertaining, always a skilled (...) craftsman. His earlier novels {Afternoon Men, 1931; Venusberg, 1932; From a View to a Death, 1933; Agents and Patients, 1936; and What's Become of Waring, 1939) are short satiric and ironic comedies dealing mainly with London bohemia in the 1920s. His later fictional work is a twelve volume tour de force (A Question of Upbringing, 1951; A Buyer's Market, 1952; The Acceptance World, 1955; At Lady Molly's, 1957; Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, 1960; The Kindly Ones, 1962; The Valley of Bones, 1964; The Soldier's Art, 1966; The Military Philosophers, 1968; Books Do Furnish a Room, 1971; Temporary Kings, 1973; Hearing Secret Harmonies, 1975) 2 in which the narrator, NicholasJenkins, attempts, with varying degrees of success, to make sense of life as A Dance to the Music of Time. Both the early and later works are populated by many characters. Manageable in the short, independent novels, they become so numerous in the interdependent volumes of Dance that several critics are dubious about anyone's keeping them straight; had I read them as they were published — with months, sometimes years and the novels of others between appearances — I am sure it would have been impossible to keep track of the minor characters. In 1960, Time and Tide published a cast ofcharacters for "readers who find it difficult to remember from book to book details of family and other more tenuous relationships between characters who have a habit of popping up surprisingly in the most unexpected places."3 The entries provide the following kinds of information: "McReith, Lady (Gwen): friend of Babs Templer and Jimmy Stripling; goes to bed with 166 Marcia Muelder Eaton167 Peter Templer when staying in the Templer (senior) house.... Tolland, George: son of Lord Warminster: was in Coldstream for some years then went into city. Very correct." More recently Hilary Spurling has compiled a book-length guide to the plots and characters ofDance. It also includes an index of books, paintings, and places referred to.4 Even with these guides there are loose ends, and it is not always clear what functions certain minor characters serve. Nonetheless, the popping-up in unexpected places is, as I hope to show, essential to the theme of the work. Powell is by no means universally acclaimed; his novels have been described as "contrived,"5 and "pseudo-Proustian" and "blandly snobbish."6 The early novels have been said to "tell about 'twentyish emancipation, silly parties at which drunks behave stupidly, ambitious young men on the make for the daughters of fox-hunting families, all with an air of slightness and couldn't-care less." 7 And Dance has likewise been scorned: To begin with, each character is introduced as he first appears to the narrator, who immediately speculates for three or four pages on the probable nature of a character who is blond, has small ears, and wears a black overcoat. The overcoat then says a few desultory words, whereupon the narrator takes several pages of pain to modify his original opinion in the light of this additional evidence.8 Like all parodies, these have some truth in them. But it is simplistic to describe his work in these terms — it amounts to painting in colors far too crude what is an enormously subtle picture of life. Powell's "easy modulations," as John Russell has called his novels,9 capture intricacies of human behavior and interaction in a profound and original way. And Powell's focus on ritual and the attempts of people to play chosen roles, ultimately provides a genuinely metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic interpretation of life. It is hopeless to try to provide a synopsis of the twelve volumes. The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins from his school days to late middle age. Friends such as Peter Templer, Charles... (shrink)

Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant has recently begun to gain the concerted attention of critics, who have noted the play’s signature blend of low and high, of ephemeral, late Regency politics with the classic genres of Sophoclean tragedy, Aristophanic comedy, and mock epic. But Austin Warren’s famous and widely accepted definition of mock epic as “not mockery of the epic but elegantly affectionate homage, offered by a writer who finds [the serious epic] irrelevant to his age” does not describe Shelley’s (...) earnest goal of immediate political reform in authoring Swellfoot. Instead, the play evinces Shelley’s unique, conscious reconfiguration of four conventions characteristic of the high, classical epic: the “prosperous breeze”; the epic simile; katabasis or descent into the underworld; and divine intervention. I argue that Shelley’s comic adaptation of these epic conventions reflects his serious aim of helping effect reform through Swellfoot and embodies his absorption of the concept of Shakespeare’s history plays as an experimental hybrid of dramatic forms with epic subjects, gained during his earlier reading of A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Though the immediate suppression of Swellfoot prevented its relevance in its own historical moment, it comprises a singular hybrid of Aristophanic satire and Sophoclean tragedy with high epic conventions, while ironically also identifying Shelley as a proponent of the French neoclassical theory of the epic’s consciously didactic purpose propounded by Le Bossu. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient SatireCedric LittlewoodRalph M. Rosen. Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire. Classical Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiii + 294 pp. 4 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $55.This book ranges from pre-literary myths and rituals of abuse to the verse satire of Juvenal in pursuit of a poetics of mockery largely abstracted from the historical contexts of its production. We (...) set the various poetic modes of Greco-Roman mockery more successfully in their historical contexts, Rosen argues, with a synchronic appreciation of the literary phenomenon we recognize broadly as satire. The Roman practitioners of this famously home-grown genre themselves demand that we broaden our horizons: Persius, for example, prefaces his satires with fourteen lines of choliambics, while Horace (mis)represents his satiric predecessor Lucilius as deriving entirely from Old Comedy (Satires 1.4.1–7). Rosen’s study is bounded by the limits of poetry: Lucian’s comic sketches have no place in this book because they lack the “otherness” of poetic speech to demarcate them from the rhetoric of the everyday. This is a distinction with which I think one may valuably take issue—the prose of Petronius’ Satyricon hardly lacks markers of its own fictionality—but it is an important one for Rosen (see below on Callimachus, Iambus 1). Drama provides the fundamental model for the satiric posture: the poet, whether or not he plays a role himself in his comedy, stages a performance of mockery for an audience. Poetic mockery is a ritual act, and the chorus of Aristophanes’ Frogs (368–76) could draw an analogy between the abuse performed in one Dionysiac ceremony (the initiates’ procession to Eleusis) and in another (comic drama). How exactly comic mockery may have evolved from religious ritual is neither Aristophanes’ nor Rosen’s concern: their aim is to invoke the ritual of religious practice as a model for the conventions of art.Comic mockery is an ugly and potentially dangerous art. For his first case study, Rosen discusses the myth of Iambe, etymological kin to the iambus of poetic invective. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Iambe interrupts the grief of her mistress with jests ( 1, 202). Demeter laughs and ends her grieving fast. Rosen argues that Iambe’s comic interlude was abuse directed against the goddess who, with her laughing response, recognized the performance of mockery as something different from an act of hostility. Whether Demeter was the target of abuse or simply the audience of a breach of decorum is hard to determine from the text, but N. J. Richardson (The Homeric Hymn to Demeter [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974], 215) usefully records the parallel Alexandrian myth of Ascalabus, whom Demeter turned into a gecko because he laughed at her in the same circumstances. The fate of the obscenely joking Cercopes who are released [End Page 433] by a laughing Hercules rather than killed in anger provides another model not just for the restorative power of laughter but for the appropriate reaction to comic mockery. What, then, are we to make of Homer’s Thersites? Gregory Nagy argued (The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], 260–62) that the base and ugly Thersites personifies the poetry of blame. His depiction and his fate show this genre’s inferiority to the epic poetry of praise. For Rosen, although many poetic characters engage in the practice of blame, “there can only be one playing the role of blame poet... and the criterion for identifying him as such is the level of “righteousness” he can persuade an audience he has on his side” (76). This, in my view, is a very difficult argument to sustain. Rosen acknowledges that an inscribed audience (here the Achaeans) does not offer a secure guide to the righteousness of the speaker, that the high moral stance of a poetic mocker is typically compromised by irony and by comedy, and that the terminology of mocker and mocked is “labile and unstable” (116). Nevertheless, a satirist whose righteousness is only intermittently convincing (as is often the case) is to be seen... (shrink)

In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), we watch the film’s protagonist, Theodore, as he struggles with the end of his marriage and a growing attachment to his artificially intelligent operating system, Samantha. While the film remains unique in its ability to cinematically portray the Lacanian contention that “there is no sexual relationship,” this article explores how our digital non-relationships can be re-approached through the medium of comedy. Specifically, when looked at through a comic lens, notable scenes from Her are examined (...) for the potential they provide in affording a self-decentrement which allows us to traverse the fantasies that structure our non-relations. (shrink)

Political humor and satire are, perhaps, as old as comedy itself, and they are crucial to our society and collective sense of self. In a poignant, pithy, but not a ponderous manner, Al Gini and Abraham Singer delve into satire’s history to rejoice in its triumphs and watch its development from ancient graffiti to the latest late night TV talk show.

This article discusses irony as an aesthetic, therefore affective, value, as exemplified in Stendhal’s irony. Affective phenomena vary in nature and intensity, and one same emotion can be coloured differently (adjectives indicate its nuances, as, for example, in “sweet nostalgia” or “desperate nostalgia” etc.). Irony involves a very complex gamut of aspects and degrees: it can be satiric, comic, tragic, nihilistic, paradoxical etc. I first consider what kinds of irony Stendhal avoided. He discarded both the tragic satire of Chateaubriand and (...) Romantic nihilistic irony. Then I look at Stendhal’s theory of laughter, as hinted at in several of his writings where he reflects upon various forms of comedy while developing his own ideal of comedy as it will appear in his major novels (see Journal littéraire, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, Racine et Shakespeare, and Correspondance). Dissatisfied with Hobbes’ definition of laughter as involving a feeling of superiority, he considered two conditions for the comic effect: clarity and suddenness. Both become fundamental in his literary style. At the same time Stendhal was convinced of the affective superiority of the moderns over the Ancients: only the moderns, forged by Christian sensitivity, experienced tender emotions. Tenderness should color everything: the novel should aim at the ideal of opera-bouffe, where comedy is “a mixture of gaiety and tenderness,” while the writer masks his tenderness by using a “sweet” (douce) irony towards his favourite characters. (shrink)

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. -/- By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. (...) In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC Debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. -/- Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film. (shrink)

Introduction: Laughter as an expression of human nature in the Middle Ages and the early modern period: literary, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological reflections -- Judith Hagen. Laughter in Procopius's wars -- Livnat Holtzman. "Does God really laugh?": appropriate and inappropriate descriptions of God in Islamic traditionalist theology -- Daniel F. Pigg. Laughter in Beowulf: ambiguity, ambivalence, and group identity formation -- Mark Burde. The parodia sacra problem and medieval comic studies -- Olga V. Trokhimenko. Women's laughter and gender politics (...) in medieval conduct discourse -- Madelon Köhler-Busch. Pushing decorum: uneasy laughter in Heinrich von Dem Türlîn's Diu crône -- Connie L. Scarborough. Laughter and the comic in a religious text -- John Sewell. The son rebelled and so the father made man alone: ridicule and boundary maintenance in The Nizzahon vetus -- Birgit Wiedl. Laughing at the beast: the judensau: anti-Jewish propaganda and humor from the Middle Ages to the early modern period -- Fabian Alfie. Yes . . . but was it funny? Cecco Angiolieri, Rustico Filippi and Giovanni Boccaccio -- Nicolino Applauso. Curses and laughter in medieval Italian comic poetry -- Feargal Béarra. Tromdhámh guaire: a context for laughter and audience in early modern Ireland -- Jean E. Jost. Humorous transgression in the non-conformist fabliaux: a Bakhtinian analysis of three comic tales -- Gretchen Mieszkowski. Chaucerian comedy: Troilus and Criseyde -- Sarah Gordon. Laughing and eating in the fabliaux -- Christine Bousquet-Labouérie. Laughter and medieval stalls -- Scott L. Taylor. Esoteric humor and the incommensurability of laughter -- Jean N. Goodrich. The function of laughter in The second shepherds' play -- Albrecht Classen. Laughing in late-medieval verse and prose narratives -- Rosa Alvarez perez. The workings of desire: Panurge and the dogs -- Elizabeth Chesney Zegura. Laughing out loud in the Heptaméron: a reassessment of Marguerite de Navarre's ambivalent humor -- Lia B. Ross. You had to be there: the elusive humor of the Sottie -- Kyle Diroberto. Sacred parody in Robert Greene's Groatsworth of wit -- Martha Moffitt Peacock. The comedy of the shrew: theorizing humor in early modern Netherlandish art -- Jessica Tvordi. The comic personas of Milton's Prolusion VI: negotiating masculine identity through self-directed humor -- John Alexander. Ridentum dicere verum (using laughter to speak the truth): laughter and the language of the early modern clown "pickelhering" in German literature of the late seventeenth century (1675-1700) -- Thomas Willard. Andreae's ludibrium: Menippean satire in The chymische hochzeit -- Diane Rudall. The comic power of illusion-allusion -- Allison P. Coudert. Laughing at credulity and superstition in the long eighteenth century. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Iago’s Roman Ancestors JAMES TATUM Othello is that rare thing: a tragedy of literary types who half suspect they are playing in a comedy. —D. S. Stewart, 1967 In memoriam Bill Cook1 Shakespeare’s Othello is a drama created for a world where everyone was bound by “service,” a formal connection to someone else superior, in a hierarchy that linked all persons in court, theater, and society through unavoidable (...) obligation. Service could range from the lightest kind of tie, to indentured servitude. This meaning of “service” reflects its origin in Norman French, from the Latin word for slavery, servitium. It is Iago’s sense of the word in his comment to his dupe Roderigo: “Why, there’s no remedy, ’tis the curse of service.” The perceived color of Othello poses a perennial challenge which producers and directors in the United States have to consider every time Othello is performed. Jim Crow did not officially end in most parts of the former Confederacy until the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s; and even then such legacies of slavery and segregation as color prejudice remain a challenge, alive if now not entirely well, and they haunt many a production. It is this more recent history that inspired Patrick Stewart’s “photo-negative” production of Othello in Washington, DC in 1997, in which the English actor himself played Othello while the rest of the cast were black. Given recent and not so recent history, it is important to realize that there actually is a slave hard at work throughout Othello, from opening scene to last: not Othello himself, but his “ancient” or ensign, Iago. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 the slave-playwright of shakespeare’s OTHELLO Lodovico: O, thou Othello, that was once so good, Fallen in the practice of a damnèd slave, What shall be said to thee? Othello, 5.2.289–91 the plot of Shakespeare’s Othello comes from the story “Disdemona and the Moorish Captain” in Giraldi Cinthio’s The Hundred Tales (1565), but the theatrical tradition he used to adapt it for the stage was not other tragedies. He went back to a classical theater he had used to write one of his earliest successes, The Comedy of Errors, one he knew as well as any other through his study of it in Latin grammar school and afterwards: Roman comedy. What resulted was something of a puzzle to his later critics. Since the 17th century some of Shakespeare’s readers have alternately complained or marveled at the way Othello has the fast pace and structure of a farce. This accounts for its exceptional power as a tragedy when it is intelligently performed; the double catastrophe of Othello’s murder of Desdemona and his own suicide come more quickly and more violently, for example, than the endings of Macbeth, King Lear, or Hamlet. All of Othello’s characters are cast in the stereotypical roles first created in Menander and other playwrights of Greek New Comedy, and then passed on to later European vernacular theater through Plautus and Terence’s adaptations. In performance, Shakespeare’s Iago is at once a reprise of his earlier stage villains and a reincarnation of the servus callidus or clever slave playwright of Plautus. It is as if Zero Mostel’s Pseudolus in Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum were playing Richard III. Iago creates what he regards as a comedy, from its opening scene before Brabantio’s house to its catastrophic end in Cyprus, and to the bafflement of Christian interpreters and others, he seems incapable of recognizing the enormity of his evil. Unlike his resourceful Roman ancestors, who think up ingenious plots to help their less clever owners 78 iago’s roman ancestors in their love affairs, Iago’s scenario is demonic, designed to destroy his master Othello, not save him. As I’ve suggested, one comedy in particular may have played an important role in the making of Othello: Plautus’ Amphitryon, with its story of Jupiter’s adulterous affair with Alcmena, the wife of the heroic king Amphitryon of Thebes. To aid him in his schemes Jupiter calls on his son the trickster... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art Education and the Emergence of Radical Art Movements in Egypt: The Surrealists and the Contemporary Arts Group, 1938–1951Patrick Kane (bio)So it wasn’t the aim of the artist to just toss out a work of art. A tradition of the exhibition of the natural, and its meaning was not that it fled from life, but that it had penetrated and plunged into reality. Its meaning was not a prescription (...) or plain exercise in the taste of the sublime, or harmony of forms and charming scenes; and its meaning was not as a decoration of life; it was in its expression of what life inspires in us to give back.—Henry Moore, as quoted by Ramses Yunan, in “The Aim of the Contemporary Artist”1In these crucial days of difficulty, the artists in this country live in tall aristocratic towers.... For this peasant has an art of his own that sustains him, and it is not that art of the educated class.—Kamil Al-Tilmisani (c. 1941–1942)By 1938, as the agrarian crisis in Egypt deepened, the Depression, food shortages, low wages, expropriations of crops, and forced rents opened a polemic among Egyptian intellectuals over the role of the state and the looming threat of fascism. With the dismissal of the government of Mustafa Al-Nahas at the end of 1937, the political turbulence underscored the weakening of the Wafd Party. Opponents of the old Wafdists and supporters of the monarchy resorted to openly fascist tactics, including the establishment of youth organizations and the Blue Shirts, the fascist front of the young Wafdists who modeled themselves on Mussolini’s Black Shirts. The serial crises of agrarian struggles and parliamentary stalemates between [End Page 95] nationalists and monarchists led to increasingly militant stances by the paramilitary fascist organization Misr Al-Fattah (Young Egypt) as a counter to the Muslim Brothers. When Mahmud Khalil resigned from the Wafd and assumed the presidency of the Senate in 1938, his ascension opened a new phase of struggle in politics through culture and the arts.2 In this context, caricatures and satirical sculptures of Khalil appeared in 1939 that parodied him as the icon of a “dictatorship of art.”3 Leading intellectuals from all political stances addressed these issues directly. The cultural journals were peppered with articles on the problems of everyday life and the material crises with such representative titles as ‘Abbas al-Aqqad’s “Food for the Rich,” in which he raised the problem of food shortages and inequity as an issue for reform.4 Within the year, articles in Al-Risala and Al-Thaqafa drew comparisons with French and Italian nineteenth-century landscapes as a model for the recognition of the countryside as a subject. In journalism and the arts, suffering became a part of the recognition of the everyday, as articles appeared on Millet’s nineteenth-century paintings of French peasants.As the war in Europe encroached into the cover pages of Egypt’s cultural journals, Zaki Muhammad Hasan wrote an essay for Al-Thaqafa entitled “The Angelus,” with a reproduction of the 1859 painting by Jean Francois Millet (1814–1874).5 Hasan wrote about Millet’s interest in the “the daily labors of the peasant” as a depiction of the conditions of French peasants. Hasan’s mention of Millet’s own peasant origins, and his listing of paintings of social conditions, including Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners), reflected a broadening interest in the artistic subject of the peasant and the rise of the peasant as artist. Although in Millet’s painting there is a prayer scene of a man and a woman in the fields that is generally regarded as the evening prayer with the sun setting, an Egyptian reader could link the prayer with the issue of workers taking breaks in the fields at a time when the issue of compensation of peasant farm workers was paramount.6 Hasan introduced “The Angelus” to his readers as a Catholic prayer in southern Europe offered at dawn, noon, and sunset and compared the origins of the prayer’s stanzas from the Gospel of Luke 1:28–31 with passages from the chapter on Maryam in the Quran... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Comedy of Menander: Convention, Variation and OriginalityDavid KonstanZagagi, Netta. The Comedy of Menander: Convention, Variation and Originality. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. 210 pp. Cloth, $39.95.In his comedies, Menander exploits a relatively limited range of characters and scenes. His achievement, as Netta Zagagi shows, lies in subtle variations on inherited formulas rather than in radical departures from them. As an example of Menander’s (...) art, Zagagi (32–33) cites the characterization of the young Moschion in Perikeiromene, who is gloriosior than Polemon, the love-sick miles. Again, Chrysis in Samia, because she acts in league with Moschion against his father, “represents a pattern of behaviour traditionally reserved for the character of the mother in comedy” (33). Behind these modifications and mergings of types, Zagagi sees an ethical motivation, best illustrated in Micio’s condemnation of his stepson’s behavior toward the woman he has raped; Terence’s Adelphi, based on Menander’s, is “the only play known to us in which any serious consideration is given to the problematic nature of the story pattern under review” (43). Surely Charisius’ soliloquy in Epitrepontes is another example. Zagagi’s reflections on Menander’s sensitivity to his personae, in contrast to Aristophanes’ delight in caricature (45), are fair enough. It is less clear that Menander differs significantly from the practice of other poets of New Comedy, as Zagagi suggests (32).In the second chapter, Zagagi explains Menander’s method of composition by invoking three principles or techniques that are fundamental to his plays: “polyphony,” “economy,” and “emphasis on human interaction.” These are catch-all terms. “Economy,” for example, refers to Menander’s restraint in the development of scenes that might have “diverted the spectator’s attention from the main subject” of an episode (60). The same term covers Menander’s ability to set out necessary information without undue repetition (62), as well as his thrifty use of devices such as Knemon’s bucket, which first gets dropped in the well and subsequently causes the misanthrope himself to fall in (64). Such dramatic parsimony is the stock-in-trade of well-made plays.Polyphony too, designates three different things. Zagagi ignores Bakhtin’s now classic use of the term to refer to the amalgamation of generic voices characteristic of the novel. Instead, she describes as polyphony the mixture of registers achieved by crossing para-tragic bits of dialogue with the plain style of comedy (54), divine intervention in mortal affairs (57), which is treated in detail in the sixth chapter, and the interweaving of two plot lines in a single play—not contaminatio, precisely, but rather a deft combination of two or more story patterns. [End Page 127]Thus, Dyskolos is analyzed (47) into a “romantic” strand, involving Sostratos’ efforts to win Knemon’s daughter as his bride, and a story line centered on the character of the misanthrope (Zagagi adds for good measure two “minor strands”: the sacrifice to Pan and the Gorgias plot). Zagagi sees as the price of this complexity a loss of dramatic unity: in order to avoid compromising the sketch of Knemon’s grumpiness, Menander does his best to keep the two plots of the comedy separate: “It is precisely from Menander’s constant effort to preserve the credibility of his main hero’s [i.e., Knemon’s] character by shielding him from the romantic action of the play, that the disunity of the Dyskolos stems” (47). This interpretation illustrates a major weakness in Zagagi’s search for elementary units of narrative as the basis of Menandrean composition. Every romantic plot requires not only a lover, but an obstacle or blocking figure (in Northrop Frye’s expression) as well, who, for motives of his own, inhibits the realization of the lover’s passion. In many plays, this function falls to the father of the adulescens, who disapproves of his son’s liaison with a slave-girl or otherwise unsuitable partner. In Dyskolos, the father of the girl (who by the same token is represented as a citizen) plays this role. This is as simple a scheme as one can have, and violates no presumed rule of unity of action. Menander... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Something to do with Demeter:Ritual and Performance in Aristophanes' Women at the ThesmophoriaAngeliki TzanetouLike his character the Kinsman, Aristophanes invades Athenian women's religious space. He puts onstage for the whole city a religious festival restricted to women. He suggests that women use this occasion to drink and plot against men, and he portrays them as carrying on adulterous affairs and duping their husbands. As a result of this negative (...) portrayal of women, scholars have concluded that the play undermines women's position in the festival and in the city. Elizabeth Bobrick (1997), for example, argues that the play misrepresents women's experience in ritual. Lauren Taaffe (1993) insists the play shows that women are only men in disguise, that it is not really about women at all but rather uses them to highlight male concerns. And Angus Bowie (1993, 227) concludes that in this play Aristophanes demonstrates that comedy, not tragedy, has the right to "give an accurate and fulsome picture of female villainy."On the face of it, Women at the Thesmophoria satirizes women's real ritual experience and does not respectfully depict the Thesmophoria-a very important festival celebrated throughout Greece, which promoted agricultural and human fertility. And yet, despite the Kinsman's invasion and his mockery of women, the role of women in ritual is not really undercut in this play. The female characters who inhabit the comic stage and protest their portrayal in drama do not aim to redefine their social roles as wives and mothers. Instead, they use the authority of their roles to mount a successful attack against Euripides because he undermines these functions. In fact, the play acknowledges and validates women's contribution to the fertility of the polis in two different ways.After the Kinsman is unmasked and taken captive by the women, four different strategies for rescuing him are staged. After all these strategies, derived from plays by Euripides, fail, a fifth strategy succeeds. As scholars have noted, the Kinsman's captivity and rescue parallel the founding myth of the Thesmophoria festival, the story of Persephone's [End Page 329] abduction and imprisonment by Hades and her rescue by her mother Demeter.1 My reading of Women at the Thesmophoria builds on this analysis by demonstrating how each of the Euripidean parodies moves closer to the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Moreover, with each of the parodies the actors become increasingly feminized. In the final scene of the play every character onstage but one is wearing female dress. Ironically, structurally and theatrically, Aristophanes' play celebrates women's power, as it is demonstrated in Demeter's rescue of her daughter and the rebirth of human and agricultural fertility.Moreover, the play affirms the centrality of women to the fertility of Athenian drama. Earlier studies have seen Women at the Thesmophoria as a competition between Euripides and Aristophanes and between tragedy and comedy (e.g., Hubbard 1991, Henderson 1996, Zeitlin 1996b, Gibert 1999-2000). The play's movement from male to female, especially in the arrangement of the parodies, is also a move from Dionysus to Demeter. The captivity/rescue plot is associated with not only Demeter and Persephone but also Dionysus, the presiding deity of Athenian theater. The stories of Dionysus' captivity and rescue are different, however; in these the god rescues himself and punishes his captors (e.g., Pentheus and Lycurgus). As the rescue strategies in Women at the Thesmophoria [End Page 330] unfold, they move from the Dionysian pattern of self-liberation and punishment of opponents to a Demetrian one of cooperation and reconciliation. This is also a movement from tragedy to comedy, in which tragedy fails to liberate while comedy succeeds. The four parodies and the final scenario move from explicitly tragic situations, including the threat of human sacrifice, to love/marriage plots and finally to men dressing as women to deceive a parodically hypermasculine male, thereby achieving a return to normality. By the end of the play, male cross-dressing does not show how easy it is to become female, but how essential women are to comedy-not only to creating laughter but also to the basic function of comedy: affirming and celebrating the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 319-328 [Access article in PDF] Introduction Mary-Kay Gamel Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai (Women at the Thesmophoria Festival) takes its title from an important three-day religious festival celebrated by women in honor of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. In this play, the playwright Euripides learns that the women of Athens plan to use the occasion of this women-only gathering to put him on trial (...) for the negative depictions of women in his plays. Euripides convinces a relative of his to dress in female costume, infiltrate the festival, and find out what the women are up to. The plot is quickly uncovered and the intruder captured. After several rescue schemes based on scenes from Euripides' tragedies fail, the playwright wins his relative's freedom by agreeing never to slander women again.Thesmophoriazousai has strong characters, a lively plot, and themes significant and timely both then and now—the relation between gender and performance, the representation of women in the media, an artist's responsibility. Yet it has received little attention from scholars and realized even fewer productions. The most obvious reason for neglect is the play's lack of explicit political commentary. Dover, for example, thinks it "leaves us with nothing difficult to think about... it has nothing to say about making peace" (1972, 169). The play contains considerable literary and dramatic criticism, in the form of both explicit commentary and parody, but this aspect has been far less studied than the contest between the tragedians in Aristophanes' Frogs. Some critics think the play weak compared to other plays of Aristophanes. Lever, for example, finds the conflict "not so clear-cut" since "the idea at stake... is only the stepping-off point for the fun that follows" (1956, 120). There are exceptions to this neglect. Norwood ranks Thesmophoriazousai far above Lysistrata: "for dazzling wit and irresistibly laughable farce combined this play is perhaps the world's finest masterpiece... glorious foolery suffused by a thrice-refined intellectual virtuosity that never misses a point, never overstresses it" (1931, 253-54). Rau (1967) gives the tragic parodies their due; in his substantial chapter on Thesmophoriazousai, Moulton declares it "skillfully composed and unified" (1981, 142); Bierl (2001) provides a detailed study of the role of the chorus. Yet the inattention continues: [End Page 319] Harriott (1986), Reckford (1987), and Segal (2001) mention the play only briefly.The years 2000 and 2001 seemed like a promising time to reconsider Thesmophoriazousai. The play's obscenity, which Norwood thought the only cause of its neglect, is no longer an obstacle. Recent scholarship on the religious and ritual context of Athenian drama helps us understand the role of the Thesmophoria and women's ritual in the play. And the rise of feminist criticism offers new perspectives on its portrayal of gender relations. Whitman unambiguously uses gender to denigrate the play: "These women are scarcely the warm wives and mothers of the Lysistrata, but rather a pack of vengeful furies... Femininity, whether real or assumed, is under a somewhat morbid cloud; by contrast, there is something genuinely refreshing about the masculinity of Mnesilochus [as he calls the Kinsman]... Comedy is virile, like Mnesilochus, and essentially truthful; tragedy is at best a hermaphroditic affair" (1964, 223-24). In a ground-breaking article first published in 1981, Zeitlin instead sees the play's connections between gender conflict and genre conflict—"the equivalence between intertextuality and intersexuality"—as the source of its power (1996, 375-416).Some feminists, however, question the function and effect of women's portrayal in Athenian plays written by males for male actors and possibly for an all-male audience. Zeitlin has argued that in Athenian tragedy, women are figures of male self-representation: "the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other... functionally women are never an end in themselves, and nothing changes for them once they have lived out their drama on stage... they play the roles of catalysts, agents, instruments, blockers... and sometimes helpers or saviors for the male characters"... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kenneth R. Seeskin THE COMEDY OF THE GODS IN THE ILIAD "... no animai but man ever laughs." Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium, 673a8-9 No reader of the Iliad can fail to be struck by the great extent to which social relations among the gods resemble those which obtain among men. Zeus, the oldest and strongest of the Olympian deities, rules as an absolute monarchor patriarch. The "council" meetings (...) over which he presides are not unlike those which occur on earth. Like Agamemnon, he must assert his authority from time to time; and, like any mortal king, he must deal with problems relating to jealousy, adultery, dishonesty, and revenge. To the extent that the gods differ from mortal heroes, those differences are similar to the ones which separate mortal heroes and commoners. The gods occupy the highest place on the scale of excellence, beauty, and social status, mortals with divine ancestry occupy the next position, and so on down the line. Although the above picture is accurate in many respects, there is something about it which is bound to leave one cold, for, unlike his mortal heroes, Homer's gods often appear as clowns. One need only recall scenes like Hephaestus' bumbling attempt to wait on the other immortals (1.584 ff.), Hera's seduction of Zeus (14.157 ff.), or the famous theomachy (21.385 ff.) to see that, ironically, humans frequendy are more dignified than the gods they are trying to please. It was scenes like these which caused Longinus, in his essay On the Sublime, to remark that Homer appears to have made his men gods and his gods men (sec. 9). Now any long story is bound to contain comic relief. But for many authors (Shakespeare, for instance), comic relief is supplied by those whose social status is lower than that of the main characters, e.g., grave diggers, nightwatchmen, country bumpkins, or pettythieves. As Aristotle argued in the Poetics (sec. 2 and 5), comedy is an imitation of men worse than the average. In Book 2 of the Iliad, Homer does use Thersites 295 296Philosophy and Literature for comic effect; yet this scene is noteworthy for being the only one in the book which supports Aristotle's contention. In practically every other case, comedy is supplied by characters better than the average: it is supplied by the gods. Moreover, in the few cases where mortal aristocrats are involved in comic situations (e.g., the rambling speeches of Nestor), the teasing tends to be extremely mild. Farce and slapstick are reserved almost exclusively for the inhabitants of Olympus. Plato, for one, was outraged by passages where the gods look ridiculous and wanted them excised from the text. Not surprisingly, there is a tradition of modern scholars who feel a similar sense of outrage. Walter Leaf, for example, maintained that the theomachy is poorly written and thus not the work of Homer.1 Gilbert Murray argued that several of the scenes in question are in bad taste, exemplify the spirit of Milesian skepticism, and, again, are not the work of Homer.2 Wilamowitz constructed an elaborate theory which claimed that these passages are the work of a later rhapsode who probably was associated with Archilochus.3 Finally, George Calhoun, who exposed the flaws of those just mentioned, concluded that such passages show the influence not of a later period of skepticism but of an earlier, less refined period and were composed merely to please Homer's audience.4 Since it is not my purpose to enter the long debate over the authorship and unity of the text, let me state the guiding assumptions of this essay dogmatically. First, the passages in question are not interpolated and serve important artistic functions. Second, for whatever reason Homer decided to include them, their presence raises profound moral and religious questions. From the outset, it is clear that any anthropomorphic conception of the gods will have to fail in one important respect. The gods are immortal, humans are not. Thus even the lowliest human can do something which no god can—risk his life. For all of their quarrels, deceptive schemes, and forays into the thick of the fighting, the gods are... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 319-328 [Access article in PDF] Introduction Mary-Kay Gamel Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai (Women at the Thesmophoria Festival) takes its title from an important three-day religious festival celebrated by women in honor of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. In this play, the playwright Euripides learns that the women of Athens plan to use the occasion of this women-only gathering to put him on trial (...) for the negative depictions of women in his plays. Euripides convinces a relative of his to dress in female costume, infiltrate the festival, and find out what the women are up to. The plot is quickly uncovered and the intruder captured. After several rescue schemes based on scenes from Euripides' tragedies fail, the playwright wins his relative's freedom by agreeing never to slander women again.Thesmophoriazousai has strong characters, a lively plot, and themes significant and timely both then and now—the relation between gender and performance, the representation of women in the media, an artist's responsibility. Yet it has received little attention from scholars and realized even fewer productions. The most obvious reason for neglect is the play's lack of explicit political commentary. Dover, for example, thinks it "leaves us with nothing difficult to think about... it has nothing to say about making peace" (1972, 169). The play contains considerable literary and dramatic criticism, in the form of both explicit commentary and parody, but this aspect has been far less studied than the contest between the tragedians in Aristophanes' Frogs. Some critics think the play weak compared to other plays of Aristophanes. Lever, for example, finds the conflict "not so clear-cut" since "the idea at stake... is only the stepping-off point for the fun that follows" (1956, 120). There are exceptions to this neglect. Norwood ranks Thesmophoriazousai far above Lysistrata: "for dazzling wit and irresistibly laughable farce combined this play is perhaps the world's finest masterpiece... glorious foolery suffused by a thrice-refined intellectual virtuosity that never misses a point, never overstresses it" (1931, 253-54). Rau (1967) gives the tragic parodies their due; in his substantial chapter on Thesmophoriazousai, Moulton declares it "skillfully composed and unified" (1981, 142); Bierl (2001) provides a detailed study of the role of the chorus. Yet the inattention continues: [End Page 319] Harriott (1986), Reckford (1987), and Segal (2001) mention the play only briefly.The years 2000 and 2001 seemed like a promising time to reconsider Thesmophoriazousai. The play's obscenity, which Norwood thought the only cause of its neglect, is no longer an obstacle. Recent scholarship on the religious and ritual context of Athenian drama helps us understand the role of the Thesmophoria and women's ritual in the play. And the rise of feminist criticism offers new perspectives on its portrayal of gender relations. Whitman unambiguously uses gender to denigrate the play: "These women are scarcely the warm wives and mothers of the Lysistrata, but rather a pack of vengeful furies... Femininity, whether real or assumed, is under a somewhat morbid cloud; by contrast, there is something genuinely refreshing about the masculinity of Mnesilochus [as he calls the Kinsman]... Comedy is virile, like Mnesilochus, and essentially truthful; tragedy is at best a hermaphroditic affair" (1964, 223-24). In a ground-breaking article first published in 1981, Zeitlin instead sees the play's connections between gender conflict and genre conflict—"the equivalence between intertextuality and intersexuality"—as the source of its power (1996, 375-416).Some feminists, however, question the function and effect of women's portrayal in Athenian plays written by males for male actors and possibly for an all-male audience. Zeitlin has argued that in Athenian tragedy, women are figures of male self-representation: "the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other... functionally women are never an end in themselves, and nothing changes for them once they have lived out their drama on stage... they play the roles of catalysts, agents, instruments, blockers... and sometimes helpers or saviors for the male characters"... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mensonge MélodramatiqueTriangular Desire in Sense and SensibilityMatthew Taylor (bio)The Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, (...) mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of Death—this Miss Austen ignores.—Charlotte Brontë1"Oh! mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!" [End Page 189]—Marianne in Sense and Sensibility2Charlotte Brontë had probably not read Sense and Sensibility (SS) before making her famous indictment of Jane Austen above, otherwise she would have found herself prophetically, and mercilessly, parodied through the character of Marianne Dashwood.3 Marianne's critique of Edward above matches Brontë's denunciation with uncanny precision. Marianne, the "stormy sister" of the novel, carries on in the same vein through most of it. What she proclaims as passionate sensibility comes off instead as, at varying times, snooty, self-indulgent, exhibitionist, and histrionic. Marianne even assumes the role of Brontë's "sentient target of Death" not long after she is cruelly jilted by Willoughby, when she wanders listlessly outdoors in the damp. It is not unlike Jane Eyre's numb wanderings when she flees Thornfield and Rochester. This "acting out" by Marianne comes close to killing her.Marianne's romantic "sensibility" contrasts with her sister Elinor's "sense." Yet, of course, readers of SS will come to know that Elinor can feel just as deeply and passionately as Marianne; she just has to conceal it. Elinor can suffer as much, too, only without the luxury of wearing it on dew-drenched sleeves. Thus, we have the thematic frame of the novel, suggested in the title. As Austen's first published novel, SS is brilliant, mature, and confident. One weakness seems to be a Brontëan one, the melodramatic coincidence in the plot that connects Colonel Brandon's secret life of compassion to Willoughby's secret sins. Otherwise, SS sits very well alongside Austen's other five masterpieces.4From the perspective of René Girard's mimetic theory, mimesis comes out with a bang in SS.5 Not only is Marianne a principal character in Austen's first canonical novel, but her romantic sensibility is thematized in the title.6 "Sensibility" for Marianne is feeling, unmediated desire expressed in unrestrained language and impulsive action. Yet Marianne's actions are anything but unmediated, and they are compulsive rather than impulsive. Even when she finally overcomes the worst symptoms under the influence of Elinor, and even though we do develop genuine sympathy for her, Marianne never comes to any deep self-knowledge. Marianne perfectly encapsulates Girard's mensonge romantique, or "romantic lie."Implying that Marianne is a liar is not a comfortable stance, and not just because we may be fond of her, but because she is open and sincere—to a fault. Yet just because Marianne is honest about her feelings, it does not follow that she is accurate about them. In fact, this is often a problem in interpreting Marianne: Her self-characterization is accepted uncritically.7 From that basis, she is framed, somewhat understandably, as representing one side of a moral debate about sensibility.8 Austen is seen as being for it, or against it, or working out some sort of accommodation. Austen is further assessed as having done [End Page 190] so well, or badly, or indifferently, as the case may be. Then Austen is seen as conforming to cultural standards, or challenging... (shrink)

What a pleasure to have such subtle thinkers and scholars as Bill Martin and Andrew Cutrofello reflect on the relation of irony and comedy to politics and philosophy through their commentary on my new book. To set the tone, Martin begins with a koan, or a parody of one, “What if a tree told a joke in the woods and there was no one there to hear it?” He means, I believe, to sound a warning on the limits of (...) irony in our serious, or perhaps, Martin would say, our seriously idiotic, times. By the end of his discussion, Martin wonders if perhaps a politics of irony might not lead to greater cynicism in our morally upside-down times and if those Wall Street rip-off artists merit something more than satire—they may .. (shrink)

What do "raves" have to do with eighteenth-century Romanticism, or the latest communication technologies with historical ideas about language, media, and culture? Today’s culture dazzles us with technological marvels and media spectacles. While we find them entertaining, just as often they are troubling — they seem to contradict common sense, eliciting such questions as What is real? or What is reality? and What is language? or What does language do? These questions, once confined to scholars, have become everyone’s concern. Some (...) of the best answers might be found in an unexpected source: Romanticism. Too often we bring the values of the Enlightenment, particularly that of reason, to critique phenomena not inherently rational, such as pop culture or the Internet. This means that much criticism of current culture already has an intellectual foundation antagonistic to it — inviting postmodern arguments that suggest history has ended and reality is an illusion. In contrast, Romanticism, a cultural movement founded in Germany and England during the late eighteenth century, offers us an archive of concepts surprisingly sensitive to these problems. The Romantics were poets, dreamers, and politicians who advanced ideas that anticipated much contemporary thinking. David Black has organized these ideas systematically, and has then applied them to key issues in communications, such as representation, audience, and the information society, as well as to significant debates in cultural studies. As a result, The Politics of Enchantment offers a new theory of media and culture that is grounded in intellectual history, yet as feverishly current as the latest digital device. (shrink)

Dieter Declercq’s Satire, Comedy, and Mental Health (2021) examines the nature and value of satire, critically reviews familiar ways of construing its value, and mounts an argument for understanding satire’s value in terms of the contributions it can make to our mental health. Declercq has much to say about longstanding debates—for example, over whether satire is a powerful political weapon (vs. a waste of political time and energy) and whether satire functions as a catalyst for needed emotional catharsis (vs. (...) merely a welcome distraction). But the most important contribution Satire, Comedy, and Mental Health makes is to open a new line of enquiry about satire—namely, enquiry into the relationship between satire and mental health—thereby widening the debate over satire’s significance and value. Specifically, Declercq argues that satire is most impressive for how it helps us cope with the limits of critique—that is, with our awareness that unjust suffering will persist despite our very best efforts. Critique cannot cure the world because we do not have endless resources to devote to solving all the world’s problems and righting all the world’s wrongs; even if we did, our efforts will not always be successful. Indeed, in some cases, our efforts might make things worse. We are finite and limited beings who simply cannot perfectly design, create, choreograph, and maintain the perfect utopias we so desire. This refreshingly new perspective makes this book an important addition to the scholarly literature on satire. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

This article tries to defend the position that Holocaust Education can be enriched by appreciating laughter and humor as critical and transformative forces that not only challenge dominant discourses about the Holocaust and its representational limits, but also reclaim humanity, ethics, and difference from new angles and juxtapositions. Edgar Hilsenrath’s novel The Nazi and the Barber is discussed here as an example of literature that departs from representations of Holocaust as celebration of resilience and survival, portraying a world in which (...) lies, hatred and violence are still perpetuated. Because of its transgressive qualities, Hilsenrath’s narrative of the Holocaust as a satire with elements of black comedy can offer pedagogical openings for using laughter to interrupt normative constructions of the Holocaust as an unspeakable and sacred event that lies outside history, and thus beyond the capacities of human understanding. It is argued that laughter is an important modality for inviting deep thinking about the Holocaust, to move it from a transcendent phenomenon to an immanent event, situated clearly in the realm of human action and worthy of understanding so as to prevent it from happening again. (shrink)

The question “What is humour?” has exercised in varying degrees such philosophers as Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer and Bergson and has traditionally been regarded as a philosophical question. And surely it must still be regarded as a philosophical question at least in so far as it is treated as a conceptual one. Traditionally the question has been regarded as a search for the essence of humour, whereas nowadays it has become almost a reflex response among some philosophers to dismiss (...) the search for essences as misconceived. Humour, it will be said, is a family-resemblance concept: no one could hope to compile any short list of essential properties abstracted from all the many varieties of humour— human misfortune and clumsiness, obscenity, grotesqueness, veiled insult, nonsense, wordplay and puns, human misdemeanours and so on, as manifested in forms as varied as parody, satire, drama, clowning, music, farce and cartoons. Yet even if the search for the essence of humour seems at first sight unlikely to succeed, I do not see how we can be sure in advance of any conceptual investigation; and in any case we might do well to start with the old established theories purporting to give the essence of humour, for even if they are wrong they may be illuminatingly wrong and may help us to compile a list of typical characteristics. (shrink)

Only two articles in the past century have attempted reconstructions of this play: Gilbert Norwood in 1930 conjectured a basis in tragic burlesque, specifically a parody of Aeschylus’Edoni, due largely to the presence of Dionysus and a chorus of Babylonians. An entirely different plot was proposed in 1983 by David Welsh, who took as his starting point Herodotus’ account of the fall of Babylon; he thought that the chorus, envisioned as a group of refugees from the Persian empire, reflected the (...) recent arrival in Athens of the grandson of the Persian primarily credited with the capture of Babylon. Though commentators on Aristophanic comedy and politics often affect to be on firm footing about this play, the total dissimilarity of these two reconstructions actually highlights our ignorance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:390 HUME'S DIALOGUES AND THE COMEDY OF RELIGION Laughter is the key to Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Indeed, I would suggest that if the Dialogues have not made one laugh, and if one has not experienced the sheer delight of Hume's rhetorical excesses and gaiety, then one hasn't really understood this work at all. From this perspective, the usual questions are irrelevant — Is Hume Cleanthes or (...) Philo? Is Philo a mitigated sceptic or a Pyrrhonian? Such debates are sterile and miss the point, for however consistent or inconsistent the characters may be, the actual drama of the text has an intention and a direction all of its own, destroying the religious hypothesis not so much by 'serious' calculated argument as by ridicule and excess. Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion are the expression of a healthy and cheerful malice which strives at every turn to intensify the sense of the absurdity of religion. Hence their flavour is primarily rhetorical, and it would be a mistake to consider them as merely a collection of paraphraseable proofs directed against the possibility of rational theology. This is not to say, however, that Hume did not take religion seriously; on the contrary, he uses all of the devices of comedy in order to overwhelm it — rather as Nietzsche was to argue: "Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. ml In this paper, I will consider the rhetorical aspect of Hume's Dialogues to show how the literary mode — the elaboration and contrast of characters, the use of parody and sudden turns in the plot, etc. — enables Hume to make a far more compelling assault on the religious hypothesis than the plain recital of 391 'reasonable' objections would ever achieve. I will focus my discussion on three central themes: First, the professed acceptance of God by all of the participants, and the consequent need for an oblique attack upon religion; second, Hume's comic perspectives on the argument from Design; and third, Hume's development of an 'antinomies of religion,' whereby the various religious arguments are used to undermine each other. 1. The Belief in God No man; no man, at least of common sense, I am persuaded, ever entertained a serious doubt with regard to a truth so certain and self-evident. The question is not concerning the being but the nature of God. Ostensibly, the one thing that is never questioned in the Dialogues, the one thing that all the participants remain agreed upon, is that God exists. Indeed, it seems that however limited the scope of natural theology may turn out to be, the actual being of God can never be in dispute, for in the Dialogues, belief in God is often presented as if it were an unchallengeable 'given' of human experience. Cleanthes, for example, apparently follows Locke in arguing for the reasonableness of theism; and yet, when he is pressed he defends the Design hypothesis in terms of its psychological irresistibility, appealing to a natural sentiment of belief rather than the claim of any argument: Consider, anatomize the eye: Survey its structure and contrivance; and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation.... it requires time, reflection and study, to summon up those frivolous, though 392 abstruse, objections, which can support infidelity (D 154). According to Cleanthes, the Design hypothesis is so self-evident that it really does not need any philosophical justification at all. It is simply the articulation of what we all already knew to be true: The comparison of the universe to a machine of human contrivance is so obvious and natural, and is justified by so many instances of order and design in nature, that it must immediately strike all unprejudiced apprehensions, and procure universal approbation (D 216). Demea also denies that religion is based upon argument. He claims that each man is brought to feel the truth of religion within himself through the consciousness of his own complete ignorance and misery. And in this respect, 'reason' can only hamper religious belief. Finally, at the end of the Dialogues, even Philo... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues that the aesthetic practices of black women stand-ups in South Africa take up the concrete ways black people all over the world use performances, within theatrical or everyday practices, to create, shape, and transform their worlds. Reading stand-up as a genre of diaspora culture meant to contend with issues of antiblack racism, economic and social marginalization, and the legacy of colonialism, this article examines the ways humor and comedy manifest transnational intimacies and affinities (...) via the circulation of black women's comic culture. Black women's stand-up comedy enables us to orient our understanding of the inextricable link between aesthetic choices and diaspora as the locus of the production of blackness, and as a particular sensibility rooted in the struggle against colonialism, antiblack racism, and the struggle for human rights and recognition. (shrink)

_Screen, Culture, Psyche_ illuminates recent developments in Jungian modes of media analysis, and illustrates how psychoanalytic theories have been adapted to allow for the interpretation of films and television programmes, employing Post-Jungian methods in the deep reading of a whole range of films. Readings of this kind can demonstrate the way that some films bear the psychological projections not only of their makers but of their audience, and assess the manner in which films engage the writer’s own psyche. Seeking to (...) go beyond existing theories, John Izod explores the question of whether Jungian screen analysis can work for ordinary filmgoers - can what functions for the scholar be said to be true for people without a background in Jung’s ideas? Through detailed readings of a number of films and programmes, John Izod builds on the work previously done by Jungian film analysts, and moves on to contemplate the level of audience engagement. Offering deep readings of films directed by Kubrick and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as satirical comedy, documentaries and twenty-first century Westerns, the book explores the extent to which they manage to make the psychological impact on spectators that films of a similar kind have done on Jungian writers. The author concludes that the screen texts with the best likelihood of impacting the culture of the audience through their collective psychological force fall at opposite ends of the size and budget range: highly personal documentaries, and the most affecting of mainstream genre movies. This innovative text will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and therapists, as well as students and scholars of film with an interest in understanding how screen products work psychologically to engage the viewer. (shrink)

Nietzsche's Ecce Homo was published posthumously in 1908, eight years after his death, and has been variously described ever since as useless, mad, or merely inscrutable. Against this backdrop, Nicholas D. More provides the first complete and compelling analysis of the work, and argues that this so-called autobiography is instead a satire. This form enables Nietzsche to belittle bad philosophy by comic means, attempt reconciliation with his painful past, review and unify his disparate works, insulate himself with humor from the (...) danger of 'looking into abysses', and establish wisdom as a special kind of 'good taste'. After showing how to read this much-maligned book, More argues that Ecce Homo presents the best example of Nietzsche making sense of his own intellectual life, and that its unique and complex parody of traditional philosophy makes a powerful case for reading Nietzsche as a philosophical satirist across his corpus. (shrink)

This paper describes a network of three interconnected, multidisciplinary research projects designed to investigate environmental health issues faced by First Nations in Canada. These projects, developed in collaboration with academia, used a participatory approach meant to build capacity, raise awareness, and initiate change. The first project, which began in British Columbia in 2008, gathered information on the traditional diet; for example, its composition, nutritional quality, and potential for chemical exposure. This 10-year, Canada-wide project served as a model for two follow-up (...) projects: one on biomonitoring and another on indoor air quality. All three projects provided community ownership over the data and communicated results in a culturally sensitive manner to encourage interest in research and initiate risk reduction activities. The Assembly of First Nations, a national advocacy organization representing over 630 First Nations communities across Canada, participated in all aspects of the research while coordinating communications and arranging timely dissemination of results. These projects showed how properly executed, community-based research can be a valuable tool for stimulating interest in scientific studies while promoting self-reliance, components often missing from academic research. (shrink)

One evening years ago I was watching a performance of the Chinese Magic Circus of Taiwan when it suddenly came to me that the fundamental characteristics of comedy were being acted out before my eyes. The discovery seems ironic in retrospect, as I did not find the performance very amusing, but the crude simplicity of the act illuminated the underlying dynamics of the genre. Two Taiwanese clowns came on stage dressed in the traditional white coverall and floppy hat that (...) signify a chef. One of them announced that he and his companion were Puerto Rican chefs, and they proceeded to set up a row of nine springy bamboo poles, each about seven feet high, each one stuck vertically into a firm base and separated from the. (shrink)

Morganeering was written by Professor Alexander Bickerton, in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the late 1800s. Various partial versions have survived with the most complete appearing in 1903. Lyman Tower Sargent searched UK and New Zealand archives, then diligently assimilated the various versions and portions to recreate this book, which he has meticulously edited. His forty-four-page introduction is well worth reading even on its own.Bickerton came from England to New Zealand in 1874 as Foundation Professor at what is now University of (...) Canterbury, in Christchurch. He was an extraordinarily popular teacher and "showman" with a passion to spread knowledge and humanism to his students and to the masses outside of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 641-644 [Access article in PDF] Erich Segal. The Death of Comedy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv + 589 pp. Cloth, $35. "In a grand tour of comic theater over the centuries," says the jacket blurb, "Erich Segal traces the evolution of the classical form from its beginnings... to Samuel Beckett. With fitting wit, profound erudition lightly worn, and instructive [End (...) Page 641] examples from the mildly amusing to the uproarious, his book fully illustrates comedy's glorious life cycle from its first breath to its death in the Theater of the Absurd." I agree, in part: It's a grand tour, after the fashion of Segal's Dionysian Ivy-League lectures, mixing pleasure with instruction and reminding the reader of comedy's changing devices, delights, and powers in the different periods and locales in which Segal has made himself comfortably at home. He doesn't, of course, "fully illustrate"—and I don't think he's gotten comedy's "life cycle" quite right, especially that titular death. Rival comedy tour guides like myself will question this or that judgment call, especially in their specialties (and still more when their own supremely valuable writings go unacknowledged). Yet there is much to praise in this highly readable, highly entertaining book, which I shall happily put on the reserve shelf next time I teach Honors 28 ("Comedy and Satire") to my laughter-loving sophomores and juniors at UNC.Segal's first 250 pages, more than half the book, take us from comedy's hypothetical beginnings in holiday fun and revelry to Terence's beleaguered Hecyra. To the usual etymologies of "revel-" and "country-song" (from komos and kome) he adds the less familiar "nightsong" (from koma, "sleep"), anticipating the prominent place of dreamlike disguises, confusions, and misadventures in comedy and in the human unconscious as explored by Freud. In subsequent chapters, Segal sketches the rise and fall of Old Comedy, which reaches new heights in the imaginatively playful erections of Aristophanes' Acharnians, Peace, and Birds, thenceforth declining towards Middle Comedy as sex gives way to money, Phales to Plutus. A chapter on Euripides' Ion entitled "The Comic Catastrophe" (why not "Eucatastrophe"?) provides a helpful bridge to the familial concerns and dramatic conventions of the New Comedy of Menander. From there, pivoting on Plautus and Terence, Segal follows "the evolution and transmutations of the classical literary form" (256), from Machiavelli and Marlowe, through Shakespeare, Molière, Jonson, Wycherley, and Beaumarchais, to what he regards as its foul and unnatural murder by the Surrealists and Absurdists of the last century—even as the beginning of Beckett's Waiting for Godot ironically completes a great circle by recalling the beginning of Aristophanes' Birds.Through all this, Segal keeps up a good, brisk pace. He chooses his plays well, discussing them with a skillful mix of plot summary, paraphrase, quotation (the good, clear translations are his own), and lively running commentary. As classicists, we readers of AJP will have our professional quibbles, our personal bones to pick (some of them juicy) about Aristophanes' Clouds (underrated by Segal), say, or Terence's borrowings from Plautus (which he plays down); but we are amateurs, too, more easily pleased when it comes to Shakespeare or Molière. Here, two of Segal's leitmotifs seem most effective and affecting: First, the dreamlike movement of events in Comedy of Errors (after Menaechmi, but we should add Amphitruo for the twice-doubling) and in Twelfth Night, drifting out of shipwreck, through confusion of identity approaching nightmare and madness, to the komos and gamos of festive comedy—or is it Freudian wish-fulfillment?; second, the sad clown or playwright, poor old cuckolded Molière, pushing to his life's very [End Page 642] end the comic enactments of cuckoldry, sickness, aging, and (near) death. Which reminds me, painfully, of what a difference it would make to our overly naive or sophisticated readings of Aristophanes or Terence if we knew more, even a little more, about their life and work than the usual, all too meager hearsay.Like his beloved Plautus, Segal... (shrink)

Drawing on reflections from a collaborative autoethnography, this article argues that ultramarathon running is defied by a 'dark' ecological sensibility (Morton 2007, 2010, 2016), characterised by moments of pain, disgust, and the macabre. In contrast to existing accounts, we problematise the notion that runners 'use' nature for escape and/or competition, while questioning the aesthetic-causal relationships often evinced within these accounts. With specific reference to the discursive, embodied, spatial and temporal aspects of the sport, we explore the way in which participants (...) begin to appreciate the immense power of nature, while being humbled by the fragile and unstable foundations of human experience. Accordingly this article contributes novel insights into the human-nature complex that seek to move beyond Romantic analyses towards a more sophisticated understanding of the relationships between (nature) sport, people and place. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:René Girard LOVE DELIGHTS IN PRAISES: A READING OF THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA Valentine and Proteus have been friends since their earliest childhood in Verona, and their two fathers want to send them to Milan for their education. Because of his love for a girl named Julia, Proteus refuses to leave Verona; Valentine goes to Milan alone. In spite ofJulia, however, Proteus misses Valentine greatly and, after a (...) while, he, too, goes to Milan. The two friends are reunited in the ducal palace; the duke's daughter, Silvia, is present and Valentine briefly introduces Proteus. After she departs, Valentine announces that he loves her and his hyperbolical passion irritates Proteus. Once alone, however, Proteus has his own announcement to make: he no longer loves Julia; he, too, has fallen in love with Silvia: Even as one heat another heat expels, Or as one nail by strength drives out another, So the remembrance of my former love Is by a newer object quite forgotten.1 If there ever was a "love at first sight," this must be it, we think, but Proteus is not so sure: in three crucial lines, he suggests a different explanation: Is it mine eye, or Valentinus' praise, Her true perfection or my false transgression, That makes me reasonless, to reason thus? (Il.iv. 196-98) 231 232Philosophy and Literature The entire comedy massively confirms the crucial role of Valentine in the genesis of Proteus's sudden passion for Silvia. According to our romantic and individualistic ideology, a borrowed sentiment such as this one is not genuine enough to be really intense. This is not true in Shakespeare; Proteus's desire is so furious that he would actually rape Silvia if Valentine did not rescue her in extremis. When Shakespeare wrote his plays, the second-hand desire he portrays had no name, no official existence, but this is no longer true. We call it mimetic or mediated desire. Valentine is the model or mediator of this desire. Proteus is its mediated subject and Silvia is their common object. Mimetic desire can strike with the speed of lightning because it does not really depend upon the visual impact made by the object; it only seems to. Proteus desires Silvia not because their brief encounter made a decisive impression on him but because he is predisposed in favor of whatever Valentine desires. Mimetic desire is not some modern idea that I would force upon an unwilling writer; it is Shakespeare's own idea and we can see this again in Proteus's soliloquy, which keeps minimizing the role of perception in the genesis of his desire for Silvia: She is fair; and so is Julia that I love, That I did love,... (Il.iv. 199-200) IfSilvia is no more desirable objectively thanJulia, her only advantage is that Valentine already desires her. Shakespeare undermines the predominance of sight in the expression love at first sight. In A Midsummer Night's Dream as well, the two girls are said to be equally beautiful, also for the purpose of reinforcing the case for mimetic desire. II The dramatic context of this first mimetic desire, and of many others in Shakespeare, is the close and ancient friendship of the two protagonists. When Proteus is about to arrive in Milan, Valentine describes this friendship to Silvia and her father: I knew him as myself; for from our infancy We have convers'd and spent our hours together. (II.iv.62-63) René Girard233 When two young men grow up together, they learn the same lessons, they read the same books, they play the same games, and they agree on just about everything. They also tend to desire the same objects. This perpetual convergence is not incidental but essential to the friendship ; it occurs so regularly and inevitably that it seems preordained by some supernatural fate; it really depends on a mutual imitation so spontaneous and constant that it remains unconscious. When we think of imitation, we imagine two people copying each other's manners, habits, accents, and even their likes and dislikes in the still childish and innocent manner of two childish friends. We never think of what Proteus's desire for... (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

The relationships between socioeconomic and biogenetic reproduction are always socially constructed but not always acknowledged. These relationships are examined as they apply to an instance of infertility and assisted reproduction presented in a seventeenth-century English play, Thomas Middleton’s 1613 comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Middleton’s satirization of the effects of secrecy on the category of reproductive disability is analyzed and its applicability to our own time considered. The discussion is in four parts, focusing on: the attribution of disabled (...) status to one member of the couple, the wife; the use of this attribution to protect the husband’s reputation for sexual and reproductive health; the concealment of the nature of assisted reproduction; and the interests of the child conceived with such assistance. (shrink)

While it has perhaps always accompanied philosophical thought – one immediately thinks of Plato’s Dialogues – the problem of the communication of that thought, and therefore of its capacity to be taught, has acquired a new insistence in the work of post-Kantian thinkers. As evidence of this one could cite Fichte’s repeated efforts to formulate a definitive version of his Wissenschaftslehre, the model of the Bildungsroman that Hegel adopts for his Phenomenology of Spirit, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (...) and Heidegger’s uncompleted Being and Time. Certainly each of these thinkers, as well as their projects, are quite distinct from the others, but their works are also signposts. It is not a question here of reducing the puzzles and difficulties of these works to some single element, some trace of a philosophical zeitgeist. Rather, it is enough to indicate this preoccupation with the problem of the communicability of thinking in order to raise the question of the modality of such a communication. How has thinking come to be so fundamentally troubled by its own expression? That Kant’s Critical philosophy has precipitated this preoccupation ought to come as no surprise, for it was Kant, most famously in the Critique of Pure Reason, who sought to definitively set the limits of philosophical thinking. In doing so, however, Kant is unable to remain utterly silent about what he himself sets outside the bounds of meaningful thought and speech: things-in-themselves. The mere fact that this meaningless element is an essential component of Kant’s philosophical exposition is an indication of the paradoxical logic of the limit: to postulate a limit is simultaneously to set out its obverse side. In Kant’s case, then, the demarcation of what can be thought carries with it the implicit thinking of what is ruled out of bounds for thought. Beginning with Fichte, the philosophical project of Kant’s successors and inheritors is then largely determined by an effort to incorporate or at least accommodate this alien element within thinking. The initial phase of this effort is marked by a tragic motif, a conjoining of thought with the experience of loss and suffering that is characteristic of Romanticism, that culminates in the dialectic of Hegel’s Absolute Knowing. In Absolute Knowing, thought has not vanquished its limitations, it has instead discovered the resources with which it can perpetually surmount them. This first phase is followed by a reaction or response to this seeming completion and overcoming of the Kantian limitation. Now, the tragic movement of thought comes to be understood as itself limited, and necessarily so according to the logic of the limit that imposes itself upon every gesture of closure. Tragedy thereby gives way to comedy insofar as the limitation that is incorporated as an obstacle to be overcome by tragic thought is shown to be the external condition of that very thought. Finally, if the comic is the fate of the limitations of tragedy, the thought of comedy itself demands a third mode of thinking, one capable of something more than the mere reiteration of the limit between comedy and tragedy that troubles them both. This third form of expression is parody, an expression appropriate to a thinking that repeats and completes the threefold movement of tragic thought while, in this very repetition, creating a limitless domain of thoughtful expression. (shrink)

The article explores the connection between enlightenment and comedy, as well as its importance for German Jewry. Following Hegel, whose thoughts on ancient drama as well as modern society have shaped the German discourse on comedy until today, this article demonstrates that questions of self-formation, emancipation, and historical self-location are central to comedy. In Carl Sternheim’s comedy The Snob, the idea of self-formation resonates with the historic concept of “civic improvement” through “Bildung”: Jewish emancipation in Germany (...) stood at the end of an educational project that outlasted Jews’ achieving legal equality. The Snob is a comedy about Jewish acculturation and bourgeoisification and embodies Marx’s understanding of comedy as ambivalent: on the one hand, comedy helps people to part cheerfully from their past that was characterized by inequality, but, on the other, it indicates that a world-historic fact like Jewish emancipation may be prone to repeat itself as a farce. Sternheim’s comedy develops a poetic that embraces ambivalence, but also opens the genre of comedy to the question of therapy and healing. It depicts the struggle between autonomy and social formation – the dialectics of German “Bildung.”. (shrink)

A Black Forest Walden is a work of philosophical reflection, nature description, and sly humor. In brief chapters, or aphorisms, the American philosopher David Farrell Krell recounts his experiences in a cabin located in the mountains of southern Germany's Black Forest, where he has lived for several decades. Insofar as Krell compares his experiences with those of Henry David Thoreau, who serves as both inspiration and irritation, the book could be described as a critical commentary on Thoreau's Walden. (...) Yet it equally reads as a rigorous yet playful and profoundly literary manifestation of where and how the mind wanders. Hence, the "Marlonbrando" of the subtitle is not the late actor but a feral cat who frequents the cabin and comes to be an important interlocutor, as if playing the role of analyst to the author. The subjects Krell treats are wide-ranging: the changing seasons, environmental issues, romantic love, parent-child relations, European versus American "values," higher education, artistic creativity, solitude, and the contrast between lifestyles in a quiet Black Forest village and in a noisy contemporary United States. Forty-one black-and-white photographs taken by the author accompany and enliven the text. (shrink)

The rich body of understudied imagery constituting the culture of satire in pre-World War I Paris represents the work of scores of contributing artists, ranging from mockery of manners to biting critique of government policy. While František Kupka is recognized as a major Parisian contributor to the development of modernism and abstraction, his career as a satirist has been sidelined. In 1900, Kupka wrote to his friend the Czech poet Josef S. Machar that he would devote himself in future mainly (...) to lithography and graphics as these media are more "democratic". Kupka published scores of cartoons in France in the prewar period and was recognized at the time as a leading satirist. Here I explore his work... (shrink)

Despite the implied critical stance of dystopian narratives, there is a strand of beautiful, aesthetically pleasant dystopias—inherently ambivalent texts that are—both fascinating and horrifying. Drawing from examples in literature and television, this article argues that “beautified dystopias” generate a surplus of aesthetic enjoyment, harboring a mystifying potential in tension with the critical-satirical potential of dystopias. In a rereading of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, this article first examine how D-503's aestheticizing voice—although undeniably constructed for a satirical effect—fosters a degree of fascination toward (...) the dystopian world in excess of Zamyatin's intentions. Second, taking Black Mirror's “Fifteen Million Merits” as an example of contemporary televisual dystopias, this article argues that the supposedly ironic construction of beautified cinematic mise-en-scènes deepens and complicates the underlying ambivalence of “beautified dystopias.” The author's assumption is that this is not an exceptional case, but rather an integral part of the current dystopian structure of feeling. (shrink)

In this article, James Gibson’s influential notion of “perceptual affordances” is applied to the romantic realm. The core idea of Gibson’s view rests on the possible, meaningful actions that the perceptual environment offers the animal. In order to sustain this idea, Gibson posits two additional major characteristics of affordances: (a) affordances are perceived in a direct cognitive manner, and (b) affordances have a unique ontological status that is neither subjective nor objective. While I accept the core idea, I have (...) doubts as to whether the two other characteristics are necessary in other types of affordances, such as social and romantic affordances. The romantic realm offers an abundance of many enticing affordances. In this regard, I discuss phenomena like the availability of a romantic alternative, romantic ambivalence, choosing a romantic partner, sexual fantasies, the road not taken, reciprocity, playing hard to get, cultivating backup mates, romantic affordances in old age and in the digital realm. In light of the abundance and complexity of romantic affordances in our current romantic environment, knowing the nature of these affordances is most useful from both pragmatic and theoretical viewpoints. (shrink)

While it cannot be denied that the 16th-century Reformation, which challenged papal authority and questioned the Catholic Church’s ability to define Christian moral practice in a just manner, indeed came with deep and lasting political changes, it remained a male-dominated discourse. The Reformation was arguably patriarchal and points to a patriarchal culture of subordination and oppression of women that prevailed then and is still pertinent in the church and all spheres of society today. The absence of Elmina and the silenced (...) yet loud voices and cries from the female dungeons below a Dutch Reformed Church in the upper levels of the castle in the retelling of the narrative of the Reformation leaves much to be desired and has a bearing on how black women perceive the Reformation 500 years later. The article thus problematises the Reformation through the heuristic eyes of Elmina Castle in Ghana as the genesis of the ‘dungeoning’ of black women justified by faith. The article argues that black women are reformers from the dungeons following the historical experience of reformation and the Reformed faith as racist and sexist, among other ills experienced by blacks in the Global South, with black women literally kept in the dungeons below a Reformed Church building as they were in Elmina with a biblical inscription, Psalm 138, on the threshold of its main door. This article thus points to irreconcilable contradictions maintained by the Reformed faith that continues to bury black women in the ‘dungeons’ even today. The enfleshment of black bodies in the dungeons of the Elmina Castle underneath a Reformed Church building is seen as the historical and heuristic starting point of engaging Reformed faith from a womanist perspective. (shrink)

Valerie Solanas deserves fresh assessment. An innovator whose aberrant humour has not been fully recognized, Solanas embarked on the male-dominated route of a type of satire that has most commonly been represented in the form of male stand-up comedy. She does not engage in the irony, absurdly overstated ‘femininity’ or parodic self-reference with which many women comedians have ridiculed male behaviour. Her Scum Manifesto (1968) declares war on the patriarchal establishment in all its multiple forms: government, capitalism, the economy, (...) law, work, the family and male sexuality. She uses the term men to condemn all persons of either sex who perpetuate the supremacy of patriarchal institutions, which she believes in all seriousness to be a deadly threat to humanity. Solanas also denounces all forms of withdrawal, separatism and élitism, which, in her view, seriously compromise the wider political applications of SCUM. This paper interprets the notorious shooting of Andy Warhol, which, especially since the film made on this subject, is often uncritically regarded as proof of Solanas’s insanity, as an iconoclastic act of theatre in which Solanas abandoned clear-cut distinctions between life and art. (shrink)

The history of philosophical thought has often been compared to a comedy of errors, and is one of the most important dimensions of the intellectual history of mankind. Quests for a correct view of the world and tragic mistakes, the polarization of philosophy into mutually exclusive trends, which is sometimes thought of as a permanent scandal in philosophy — these are not merely the searchings and sufferings of individual thinkers. This is the intellectual odyssey of mankind, and those to (...) whom it appears a farce apparently interpret the tragic only as the idols of the theater. But the fact is that antinomies, crises, retracing of steps, the discarding of real truths in favor of erroneous concepts long since refuted but stubbornly taken as true — are these things characteristic of philosophy alone? Philosophy is the intellectual image of mankind, and the contradictions of its development are of no small importance to the intellectual biography of humanity. (shrink)

Using the turn of the century blackface performer Bert Williams as a case study, this essay explores how we might think about black male performativity in the New World as a historical formation, one that extends both over the time of modernity and across the space of diaspora. I draw from contemporary theories of circum-atlantic performance and black feminist studies of the impact of slavery on black racial and gendered identities, to argue that performance affords a unique (...) window into how blackness is constructed in a space between the black male performer and his equally racialized New World audience. The essay theorizes a notion of key black male performances as ‘signature acts’, then explores discussions of minstrelsy by other black American writers such as Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and the black British writer Caryl Phillips. Using Fanon's notions of triple-consciousness in tandem with Brechtian and Freudian theories of alienated performances and jokes, the essay concludes with a brief analysis of some of the gendered significations in lyrics from Bert Williams’ first musical comedy and then also in a novel about the performer by Caryl Phillips. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to plumb the conventions which exist at a specific historical moment in both the aesthetic and scientific spheres. I will assume the existence of a web of conventions within the world of the aesthetic—conventions which have elsewhere been admirably illustrated—but will depart from the norm by examining the synchronic existence of another series of conventions, those of medicine. I do not mean in any way to accord special status to medical conventions. Indeed, the world is (...) full of overlapping and intertwined systems of conventions, of which the medical and the aesthetic are but two. Medicine offers an especially interesting source of conventions since we do tend to give medical conventions special “scientific” status as opposed to the “subjective” status of the aesthetic conventions. But medical icons are no more “real” than “aesthetic” ones. Like aesthetic icons, medical icons may iconographic in that they represent these realities in a manner determined by the historical position of the observers, their relationship to their own time, and to the history of the conventions which they employ. Medicine uses its categories to structure an image of the diversity of mankind; it is as much at the mercy of the needs of any age to comprehend this infinite diversity as any other system which organizes our perception of the world. The power of medicine, at least in the nineteenth century, lies in the rise of the status of science. He conventions of medicine infiltrate other seemingly closed iconographic systems precisely because of this status. In examining the conventions of medicine employed in other areas, we must not forget this power.One excellent example of the conventions of human diversity captured in the iconography of the nineteenth century is the linkage of two seemingly unrelated female images—the icon of the Hottentot female and the icon of the prostitute. In the course of the nineteenth century, the female Hottentot comes to represent the black female in nuce, and the prostitute to represent the sexualized woman. Both of these categories represent the creation of classes which correspondingly represent very specific qualities. While the number of terms describing the various categories of the prostitute expanded substantially during the nineteenth century, all were used to label the sexualized woman. Likewise, while many groups of African blacks were known to Europeans in the nineteenth century, the Hottentot remained representative of the essence of the black, especially the black female. Both concepts fulfilled an iconographic function in the perception and the representation of the world. How these two concepts were associated provides a case study for the investigation of patterns of conventions, without any limitation on the “value” of one pattern over another. Sander L. Gilman is professor of Humane Studies in the Department of German Literature and Near Eastern Studies and professor of Psychiatry in the Cornell Medical College, Cornell University. He is the author or editor of numerous studies of European cultural history with a focus on the history of stereotypes. In addition, he has coedited Degeneration with J. E. Chamberlin. His study Jewish Self-Hatred is forthcoming. (shrink)

Thinking of Death places Plato's Euthydemus among the dialogues that surround the trial and death of Socrates. A premonition of philosophy's fate arrives in the form of Socrates' encounter with the two-headed sophist pair, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, who appear as if they are the ghost of the Socrates of Aristophanes' Thinkery. The pair vacillate between choral ode and rhapsody, as Plato vacillates between referring to them in the dual and plural number in Greek. Gwenda-lin Grewal's close reading explores how the (...) structure of the dialogue and the pair's back-and-forth arguments bear a striking resemblance to thinking itself: in its immersive remove from reality, thinking simulates death even as it cannot conceive of its possibility. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take this to an extreme, and so emerge as the philosophical dream and sophistic nightmare of being disembodied from substance. The Euthydemus is haunted by philosophy's tenuous relationship to political life. This is played out in the narration through Crito's implied criticism of Socrates-the phantom image of the Athenian laws-and in the drama itself, which appears to take place in Hades. Thinking of death thus brings with it a lurid parody of the death of thinking: the farce of perfect philosophy that bears the gravity of the city's sophistry. Grewal also provides a new translation of the Euthydemus that pays careful attention to grammatical ambiguities, nuances, and wit in ways that substantially expand the reader's access to the dialogue's mysteries. (shrink)