A distinctive feature of Russian formalism, something we do not see in Bell and Fry or in Wölfflin and Riegl (or see it more rarely, see Section IV below), is this emphasis on the analysis of everyday perception and the ways in which art encourages us to perceive differently. But it is difficult not to read the concept of defamiliarization as a naïve early statement of what art historians and aestheticians of the second half of the 20th century criticized (...) as the “Innocent Eye” tradition. As talking about the Innocent Eye is now universally frowned upon, defamiliarization has not been taken as seriously as it should have been. The aim of this paper is to revive the concept of defamiliarization by showing that it has nothing to do with the “Innocent Eye” tradition and to propose a new interpretation of it in terms of distributed attention. I conclude that this reinterpreted concept of defamiliarization can be very useful for contemporary post-formalist accounts of the history of vision (and imagination as well as visual attention). (shrink)

In response to my article “Earth, Technology, Language”, Christopher Müller asks whether use-oriented theory and Wittgensteinian language can capture the structural relations of power that shape habituation and argues that digital media do not provide opportunities for empowerment and democracy because there is no co-ownership. In my reply I argue that I have shown that this can be done with the broader conception of use I propose, that the grammar of technology should also be understood in terms of implicit knowledge, (...) and that technology, like language, also has a public dimension: I claim that there is no such thing as a private technology or private power, and that some degree of co-ownership or resistance is possible. In the second part of the paper I reply to Bas de Boer’s questioning of my criticism of postsphenomenology. I insist that postphenomenology does not have the full instrumentarium to carry out an adequate and comprehensive analysis of the social dimension of technology use, and that it is important to attend to the structural dimension of technology, with or without use of the term ‘transcendental’. I clarify my use of the term as referring to conditions of possibility. (shrink)

Dreamcore originates from a video (or image) form submitted on 21 April 2018, when an anonymous user posted a thread on 4chan’s paranormal section collecting images that would make people feel ‘uncomfortable', and another user’s comment under it gained the attention of the community. And it has been a new subculture that uses familiar scenes to make the audience nostalgic but uneasy, with two important characteristics: ‘Lost items’ and ‘exposed shame’. In contrast to the philosophical concept ‘sense of material’, the (...) absolutely independent defamiliarization, or liminal space’s ‘neither … nor … ’, ‘lost items’ pursues the familiarity in strangeness without resorting to the expression of magical reality, or using ambiguity between the two to create a ‘either … or …’ atmosphere; Compared with modern urban planning based on the principle of ‘ecology’, ‘exposed shame’ reveals infrastructures that do not match the natural setting in the image, causing abruptness and embarrassment. Both point to the dreamcore’s playful ambiguity, thus not being governed by serious art and symbolising the original intention of free creation. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 183-205.

In this paper I address some related aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished texts, The Visible and the Invisible and The Prose of the World. The point of departure for my reading of these works is the sense of philosophical disillusionment which underlies and motivates them, and which, I argue, leads Merleau-Ponty towards an engagement with art in general and with literature in particular. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s emerging conception of ethics—premised on the paradox of a “universal singularity” and concerned with the (...) concrete experience of the individual subject, rather than with abstractions and formal categories—can best be articulated through the formalist concept of “defamiliarization,” the fundamental performativity of all literature, and the dialogic relations which, though inherent in all discourse, become most powerfully evident in the dynamics of reading. (shrink)

This essay argues that literature is neither an intrinsic good (like oxygen) nor a constructed good (like a teddy-bear) but instead a conditional good, like a blueprint. It has immense potential value, but that potential can be actualized only if readers do a certain kind of work; and readers are likely to do that work only if, as a culture, we retain an understanding of what novels and poems both need from us and can give us. This means we need (...) to be wary of theories that are excessively deflationary (all literature is mere entertainment), cynical (all literature is a vehicle for state ideology), or over-optimistic (all literature makes us more altruistic) and instead embrace a pluralism of effect. Some fictions, like The Wire, invite us to reflect on our own beliefs; some, like Plato’s dialogues, help us fine-tune our mental capacities; some, like Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, offer us a choice of genres; some help us feel our feelings; some offer formal models for the shape of a life. Literature can continue to matter in all of these ways—but only as long as we allow it to. (shrink)

Introduction : rethinking historical distance : from doctrine to heuristic -- Machiavelli between history and chronicle -- A study in contrasts : Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and the idea of example -- "The most illustrious philosopher and historian of the age" : Hume and the balances of enlightenment history -- "What sympathy then touches every human heart!" : emotional identification in enlightenment and romantic histories -- Hundred Scottish ministers write the history of everyday life : contrasting distances in Sinclair's "Statistical account of (...) Scotland" -- Past and present : contrastive narratives in the romantic age -- "The very web and texture of society as it really exists" : literary history in historiographical perspective -- "A topic that history will proudly record", or, What is the "history" in history painting? -- On the advantage and disadvantage of sentimental history for life -- Alternative histories in the public realm : familiarizing and defamiliarizing the past -- Epilogue : My Lai and moral luck, or, 'Tis forty years since. (shrink)

"I am a Jew who was born and who grew up in a Catholic country; I never had a religious education; my Jewish identity is in large measure the result of persecution." This brief autobiographical statement is a key to understanding Carlo Ginzburg's interest in the topic of his latest book: distance. In nine linked essays, he addresses the question: "What is the exact distance that permits us to see things as they are?" To understand our world, suggests Ginzburg, it (...) is necessary to find a balance between being so close to the object that our vision is warped by familiarity or so far from it that the distance becomes distorting. Opening with a reflection on the sense of feeling astray, of familiarization and defamiliarization, the author goes on to consider the concepts of perspective, representation, imagery, and myth. Arising from the theme of proximity is the recurring issue of the opposition between Jews and Christians -- a topic Ginzburg explores with an impressive array of examples, from Latin translations of Greek and Hebrew scriptures to Pope John Paul II's recent apology to the Jews for antisemitism. Moving with equal acuity from Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius to Montaigne to Voltaire, touching on philosophy, history, philology, and ethics, and including examples from present-day popular culture, the book offers a new perspective on the universally relevant theme of distance. (shrink)

A landscape is commonly conceived as an arrangement of items on solid or liquid surfaces. Despite its entanglement with the landscape, the weather condition tends to be overlooked. The liminal case of a thick fog that suppresses the view of the environment challenges this standard understanding. The paper examines the experience of being lost in fog with respect to perceptual, spatiotemporal and emotional aspects. Fog suspends the everyday scopic regime and the inconspicuous ‘immateriality’ of air as medium of perception, distorting (...) the patterns of perception and temporarily installing an own spatiotemporality. Moreover, fog is an atmospheric phenomenon par excellence, a quasi-thing and a quasi-agent that is usually felt as distressing and maleficent yet may trigger a sense of wonder as well. While it is considered a deficit in epistemic issues, nebulosity has a strong aesthetic expressivity, whose sources range from semantic ambiguity to defamiliarization and the transfiguration of the ordinary. (shrink)

In the Aeneid, Virgil sets out to achieve a new sublime style, paradoxically steeped in the common parlance. He aims for the spontaneity of everyday language to win readers’ involvement, while elaborating a discourse both expressively taut and stylistically marked, that avoids a register too colloquial or prosaic. Above all, he tirelessly deploys an array of subtle strategies – below the threshold of perception – that defamiliarize language in order to elevate its style. The present paper furnishes a selection of (...) case studies. (shrink)

Much of the recent psychological literature on boredom aims to define, categorize, and measure boredom in order to assess it, to identify correlated mental pathologies, to find the psychophysiological bases of boredom, or to apply the findings to specific settings or social groups. This literature uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to seek an objective, scientific understanding of boredom. It presupposes that boredom is an aversive, individual experience, which psychology can help ameliorate, prevent, or divert. By contrast, Kierkegaard uses his (...) methods of ‘experimenting psychology’ and ‘indirect communication’ to deploy boredom in awakening his reader to the task of becoming a self. He uses literary devices and exemplary characters to this end. Heidegger pursues a similar aim: to awaken the reader/listener to the possibility of attuning herself to profound boredom in a way that will enable her to become an authentic self. Heidegger uses a method of historical, hermeneutic phenomenology to enable his reader to hear the call of being through an attunement to profound boredom. He starts with the familiar experience of boredom, then defamiliarizes his listener to enable an original grasp of the meaning of being. (shrink)

The work of Gloria Anzaldúa has not typically been read in concert with utopian studies. Much of her writing, however, offers a rich resource for utopian critique. This is a significant omission given that much of Latin@ speculative fiction has been deemed inherently utopic. Latin@futurism is a field of inquiry by which to focus on the utopian as a broader category of visionary, speculative forms. Anzaldúa draws on techniques of defamiliarization to usher a change of consciousness in the reader, (...) exemplified by her theories of conocimiento, el cenote, and nepantla. This article discusses Anzaldúa's theory of el cenote as a powerful heterotopic space of renewal and transformation in Yuri Herrera's novel Signs Preceding the End of the World. Anzaldúa's theories of conocimiento and nepantla flesh out culminating aspects of borderlands dreaming in the novel that connect to a discourse of apocalypse and its relationship to historical renewal and social justice. (shrink)

This article critically discusses Hubert Dreyfus’s idea of mindless-skillful coping, arguing that this notion provides an incomplete picture of human dwelling. While contemporary scholarship addressed the problematic aspects of Dreyfus’s pragmatic approach to Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, a concentrated effort to show the discord between Dreyfus’s skillful coping and Heidegger’s account of dwelling is wanting. Refuting the idea that the most complete version of human dwelling only signifies immersion in bodily practical skills, the article brings into view the significance (...) of the confrontational nature of dwelling, which requires a hermeneutic capacity of defamiliarization from our everyday worlds and habits. Explaining how humans’ relation to the world is different than those of robots or computers does not suffice to explicate authentic human dwelling. The author elucidates why Dreyfus’s prioritization of the practical over the theoretical and the corporeal over the mental leads to a dualistic mode of thinking. Finally, returning to the discussion of existential spatiality in Being and Time, the author identifies Dreyfus’s lack of an explicit understanding of place, one that would be necessary for a coherent account of poetic human dwelling. (shrink)

In patriarchy women are frequently perceived as “the other” and as such they are subject to discrimination and marginalization. The androcentric character of patriarchy inherently confines women to the fringes of society. Undeniably, this was the case in Western culture throughout most of the twentieth century, before the social transformation triggered by the feminist movement enabled women to access spheres previously unavailable to them. Feminist science fiction of the 1970s, like feminism, attempted to challenge the patriarchal status quo in which (...) gender-based discrimination against women was the norm. Thus, authors expressed, in a fictionalized form, the same issues that constituted the primary concerns of feminism in its second wave. As feminist science fiction is an imaginative genre, the critique of the abuses of the twentieth-century patriarchy is usually developed in defamiliarized, unreal settings. Consequently, current problems are recontextualized, a technique which is meant to give the reader a new perspective on certain aspects of life they might otherwise take for granted, such as the inadequacies of patriarchy and women’s marginality in society. Yet there are authors who consider the real world dystopian enough to be used as a setting for their novels. This is the case with Woman on theEdge of Time by Marge Piercy and The Female Man by Joanna Russ. Both texts split the narrative into a science fictional and a realistic strand so as to contrast the contemporary world with utopian and dystopian alternatives. Both texts are largely politicized as they expose and challenge the marginalized status of women in the American society of the 1970s. They explore the process of constructing marginalized identities, as well as the forms that marginalization takes in the society. Most importantly, they indicate the necessity of decisive steps being taken to improve the situation. (shrink)

This article argues that the defamiliarization caused by extensive repetition, termed ‘semantic satiation’ in psychology, was used by ancient poets for specific effects. Five categories of repetition are identified. First, words undergo auditory deformation through syllable and sound repetition, as commonly in ancient etymologies. Second, a tradition of emphatic proper-name repetition is identified, in which the final instance of the name is given special emphasis; this tradition spans Greek and Latin poetry, and ultimately goes back to the Nireus entry (...) in the Catalogue of Ships. Third, repetition is used for wordplay, where the final instance of the repeated term not only is emphasized but also incurs some change to its meaning or shape. Fourth, the incantatory repetition of divine names in hymns and cultic invocations amplifies a sense of divine presence behind and beyond the repetend. Fifth, repetition of half and full lines by different speakers in Old Comedy serves to undercut and parody the original sense of the repeated words. Extensive repetition in ancient literature was never merely ornamental but was used for a range of specific auditory and semantic effects with distinct and identifiable structures. (shrink)

In My Kantian Ways, Ermanno Bencivenga, one of the most creative and iconoclastic practitioners of American philosophy, sets out to explore Kant's legacy for contemporary thought. Seeking to extricate the German philosopher's work from the stranglehold of the prevailing analytic tradition, he presents his own defamiliarizing and unique interpretation of Kantianism. Kant emerges as a master thinker whose emphasis on judgment provides the basis for a new approach to the practice of philosophy as a vehicle for learning. Ranging from speculations (...) on the electronic self to a tour-de-force critique of the postmodern thought of Richard Rorty, Bencivenga's book is an inviting blend of styles and genres. Plucky, irritating, and sometimes wickedly funny, My Kantian Ways calls attention to the frequent mediocrity and false piety of much of today's professional philosophy. Through these intensely personal essays, Bencivenga reminds us just how much philosophy can matter. In My Kantian Ways, Ermanno Bencivenga, one of the most creative and iconoclastic practitioners of American philosophy, sets out to explore Kant's legacy for contemporary thought. Seeking to extricate the German philosopher's work from the stranglehold of the prevailing analytic tradition, he presents his own defamiliarizing and unique interpretation of Kantianism. Kant emerges as a master thinker whose emphasis on judgment provides the basis for a new approach to the practice of philosophy as a vehicle for learning. Ranging from speculations on the electronic self to a tour-de-force critique of the postmodern thought of Richard Rorty, Bencivenga's book is an inviting blend of styles and genres. Plucky, irritating, and sometimes wickedly funny, My Kantian Ways calls attention to the frequent mediocrity and false piety of much of today's professional philosophy. Through these intensely personal essays, Bencivenga reminds us just how much philosophy can matter. (shrink)

The author compares the outlook of the early twentieth-century Russian literary and artistic avant-garde with the anticapitalist critique of the early Marx, with special reference to the concepts of defamiliarization and alienation.

: Erich Auerbach's famous comparative study of Homer and the Bible, "Odysseus' Scar," argues that their contrastive styles derive from the different possibilities available to oral tradition and literature. In support of this thesis, I invoke two theories of verbal art: Walter Benjamin's description of the storyteller's craft, and Victor Shklovsky's definition of art as "defamiliarization." Through a comparative analysis of the use of type-scenes in Homer and in biblical narrative, I demonstrate how Homer is a traditional storyteller, practicing (...) an "art of the familiar," whereas biblical narrative "defamiliarizes" traditional forms. (shrink)

How does Richard Shusterman’s Thinking Through the Body apply to the issues of everyday aesthetics? As it turns out, many chapters contribute significantly to everyday aesthetics, in particular the work on architecture, self-styling, the body as background, lovemaking, and the process of making a photographic portrait. Shusterman’s concentration on the art of living has special importance to everyday aesthetics. Current debates within the field of everyday aesthetics also raise problems for somaesthetics. I also question the limits of somaesthetics and Shusterman’s (...) rejection of defamiliarization in making the ordinary extraordinary. (shrink)

Mark Coeckelbergh’s mobilisation of Wittgensteinian language games makes an important contribution to exposing the social dimension of machine use. This commentary asks to what extent this social dimension of meaning and the wider imaginary that forms around technological objects on account of the transparency of language is also part of a technological “confidence trick”. It suggests that philosophical anthropology, especially the perspectives developed by Günther Anders and Helmut Plessner, can offer additional resources to trace and critique the wider ownership structures (...) and social relations of power that Mark Coecklebergh’s work productively exposes. It argues that language games alone cannot fully account for the hidden social relations that are habitually presented to us as abilities of “smart”, “intelligent” machines. Here a language that defamiliarizes machines, tries to make them visible by using exaggerated, pessimistic and object-oriented perspectives can perhaps help to make these power-relationships more comprehensible, “obvious” and thereby resistible and open to debate. (shrink)

Resumo O presente artigo aborda a construção dos objetos literários na experiência humana, com base nas ideias de Schrödinger sobre a construção da realidade, publicadas entre 1928 e 1964. Sugere-se relacionar a construção de tais objetos aos processos de resgate de invariantes e de construção de objetos científicos, na abordagem schrödingeriana. No entanto, nota-se que essa abordagem não é suficiente para explicar certos casos. Assim, propõe-se adicionar a conceituação de desfamiliarização, concebida por Shklovsky, em 1917, e revisitada por Banes, em (...) 2003. Essa concepção consiste basicamente em tornar estranho o que é familiar, provocando a atenção na sua direção e despertando a consciência, através de uma experiência marcante. A desfamiliarização mostra-se adequada para descrever momentos em que há quebra de expectativas e resgate de sensações. Este trabalho explora, ainda, exemplos que ilustram esses processos, examinando trechos de obras de H. G. Wells e enfatizando os objetos científicos que são resgatados na ficção. Esta análise evidencia que tais objetos passam por desfamiliarização, embora de forma distinta dos objetos cotidianos. Além disso, alguns dos trechos ressaltados sugerem que a desfamiliarização é acentuada na leitura de ficção científica.This paper approaches the construction of literary objects in human experience, based on Schrödinger’s ideas on the construction of reality, published between 1928 and 1964. It is suggested relating the construction of such objects to the Schrödingerian account of the processes of invariants’ retrieve and construction of scientific objects. Nevertheless, such approach doesn’t seem sufficient to explain certain cases. Hence, the addition of the notion of defamiliarization, advanced by Shklovsky in 1917 and revisited by Banes in 2003, is proposed. This conception consists basically in making familiar things strange, driving attention towards its direction, through a memorable experience. Defamiliarization seems adequate to describe moments in which expectations are broken and a return to sensations is observed. This article also explores some examples that illustrate those processes. Some fragments of H. G. Wells’s works are examined and scientific objects that are restored on fiction are emphasized. Such analysis indicates that these objects are also submitted to defamiliarization, however differently from quotidian objects. Besides, some of the examined texts indicate that defamiliarization is intensified in Science Fiction reading. (shrink)

The purpose of the research is to analyze the context, the essence, and the philosophical implications of Franz Rosenzweig's reconsideration of the ban on idolatry as an implication of pure monotheism. As often as not idolatry is defined generally as the adoration of some images that, representing deity, are considered to be autonomous and hereupon become the objects of worship. The study confines itself to the analysis of the significance of the ban on idolatry in Rosenzweig's interpretation of the concept (...) of difference that underlies his theoretical model of the Other. The consideration proceeds on the general assumption that the encounter of tradition with modernity is the factor that determines the radical change in the philosophies of societies under modernization. In this context, the ancient ban on idolatry means the rejection and prohibition of whatever representation as intricate mediation that is, in turn, the hallmark of modernity. However, according to Rosenzweig, idolatry is not the usage of images as the representations of the reputedly unrepresentable God, but the fixation on one image which would mean the arbitrary limitation of God's infinite freedom to reveal himself visually. This implies that the reconsidered ban on idolatry does not require the absolute prohibition of representation, but the latter should be construed as temporal. Such an approach prevents the identification of the representation of entity with this entity itself, the sign with the thing, and therefore prohibits self-referentiality. Rosenzweig's stance determines also his understanding of familiarity, unfamiliarity, and difference in art and translation. Rosenzweig's emphasis on the shocking influence of the defamiliarizing difference as the feature of the work of art correlates with his interpretation of the translation that should make stable shared senses unfamiliar. Thus, the reconsidered ban on idolatry underlies Rosenzweig's conception of the reconciliation between Jewish tradition and modernity. (shrink)

After a spate of monographs on Pierre Gassendi in the mid-1990s, the scholarly discussion of this most difficult French philosopher has largely been confined to the pages of scholarly journals. Except for Sylie Taussig's fine translation of Gassendi's Latin letters into French, and an issue of Dix-septième siècle devoted to the thinker, no major book-length study has appeared. Antonia LoLordo fills this gap in Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Her aim is "defamiliarizing the early modern philosophic (...) landscape" by introducing Gassendi as a major player in a diverse topography of thought. In her analysis, LoLordo articulates and critiques the philosophic content of Gassendi's various works, as well as challenging the interpretations of some of his modern exegetes, most notably, O. R. Bloch and Margaret J. Osler.LoLordo focuses on Gassendi's natural philosophy, epistemology, and ontology. Her contention that Gassendi "was a central figure in seventeenth-century philosophy" will come as no surprise to those familiar with the course of early modern philosophy. LoLordo systematically treats Gassendi's major and minor works, especially his early anti. (shrink)

Three of Zygmunt Bauman’s recent books are assessed to present insights into the recent development of his thought and the challenges it poses to the social sciences, humanities and the wider public. By reading Bauman’s recent work through the influence he takes from Georg Simmel, the former’s disparate recent work is understood as an attempt at the cultivation of critical and ethical engagement through the externalization and objectification of his own subjective culture. The more radical elements of Bauman’s work are (...) emphasized in his attempts to stimulate a counter-culture through encouraging critical analysis of society. It is proposed that he achieves this through ‘polylogic’ discourse and engagement with the public. Sociology is presented as a tool of freedom through ‘defamiliarizing the familiar’ and Bauman’s most powerful tool in this is the demonstration of his particular critical view of the world. The broad-ranging engagement with diverse topics in his recent books enables him to place this critical perspective, rather than a particular topic or issue, at the centre of his work. The metaphorical and other literary devices used by Bauman to stimulate critique and in particular to spur on the radical potential of youth are highlighted as some of his most powerful contributions. (shrink)

Education as a deliberate activity and purposive process necessarily involves mediation, in the sense that the educator mediates between the child and the world. This can take different forms: the educator may function as a guide who initiates children into particular practices and domains and their modes of thinking and perceiving; or act as a filter, selecting what of the world the child encounters and how; or meet the child as representative of the adult world. I look at these types (...) of mediation at the hand of the work of John Dewey, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Richard Peters. The purpose of this paper is to explore the bearing that the mediating role of the educator—as interpreted by these authors—has on the role wonder may play in the educational process. I suggest that initiation highlights the familiarizing function of wonder, and is most readily associated with inquisitive wonder; representation draws attention to the defamiliarizing role of wonder, as well as to its world-affirming role; and selection foregrounds the distinction between momentary and dispositional wonder. (shrink)

Novels in general use three different modes of reporting: narration, dialogue and description. Understanding that even with a given mode, such as the description of a stone, the relation between the diachronic flow of language and the synchronic focus of attention can be manipulated, we can still note that in general narration reports occurrences in a reading time considerably less than actual time. , dialogue reports occurrence in a reading time roughly congruent with actual time , and description reports occurrences (...) in a reading time considerably greater than actual time . Thus, in the interweaving of narration, dialogue and description a narrative not only defamiliarizes what it reports but guides the reader's consciousness through rhythms of correspondence between reading time and actual time. As long as we do not stay entirely in one mode—and we never do—these rhythms adjust the movement of our consciousness so that unconsciously at least we more or less approach synchronicity, depending on the particular techniques—but we never achieve it. Spatial form may be thought of as a tendency, but in ordinary language it is never achieved. Eric S. Rabkin is professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The author of Narrative Suspense, The Fantastic in Literature, and many articles on science fiction, he is also the coauthor of Form in Fiction and Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. He contributed "Metalinguistics and Science Fiction" to the Autumn 1979 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

This essay highlights a methodological weakness in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism often mistaken for a biographical shift in his philosophy. Naissance de la biopolitique is sometimes interpreted as evidence for Foucault’s conversion to neoliberalism, whereas its lack of critical acuity stems rather from its methodological limitations. Through a discussion of the “neoliberal conversion”-thesis, I highlight those limitations. Though Foucault’s appreciative tone in his neoliberalism lectures is surprising, his aim is mainly to defamiliarize readers from the dominant mode of neoliberal rationality (...) so that they can affirm the creative potential to foster new conducts, new identities, and new rationalities. Foucault did not convert to neoliberalism, but sought to destabilise it by revealing its historical contingency. However, as Foucault’s surprisingly positive tone shows, this strategy is insufficient for combatting neoliberalism. There is an elective affinity between Foucault’s own politics of creative self-reinvention and neoliberalism’s promise of a non-invasive, post-disciplinary government by indirect economic incentives alone. Foucault’s libertine stance toward subjectivity hence seems easily integrated into a neoliberal conduct of conducts. I propose to supplement Foucault’s genealogical method as he deploys it in Naissance de la biopolitique with an immanent critique of neoliberalism from the perspective of the governed. Rather than investigating neoliberal rationality as a promising endeavour for the future, we can study the real-life implementations of neoliberalism and their effects on subjective conducts. Neoliberal rationality is involved in a permanent struggle to shape the conduct of conducts along entrepreneurial and competitive lines, but subjects are refractory living beings whose conducts are not so simply transformed. Neoliberalism has had to give up its post-disciplinary aspirations and turn to the power of discipline and abandonment to enforce neoliberal norms of conduct. Neoliberalism has transformed into a negative biopolitics that sacrifices the lives of unproductive subjects as collateral damage to the overall welfare of the population. Immanent critique thereby reveals how subjects are pushed beyond their limits until neoliberal norms of conduct become unbearable. This intolerability of neoliberalism cannot be directly deduced from the writings of Becker, Friedman, or Hayek.111 It becomes manifest in the confrontation between neoliberal rationality and the material living bodies of finite human beings unable to be stretched in the ways neoliberalism requires. (shrink)

This article discusses how everyday speech was mediated in early modern England: how speech was registered and remediated through various cultural techniques making it recognizable as a distinct linguistic medium and how these processes intersected with literary writing. A contribution to the study of the early modern English mediascape and its literary ramifications, this essay is also an effort to think historically about media change and literary transformation both as they happen and as they become visible over time. In what (...) follows, I trace the relationship between speech and the cultural techniques that engage with speech as the medium of everyday face-to-face interaction. Although my question is ultimately about speech, not poetry, and although the larger question I am interested in is not about artistic production but about media and cultural techniques more broadly, literary—poetic and especially dramatic—writing is nevertheless central to my essay. My argument grows out of the insights of twentieth-century literary criticism, whose observations about the relationship between speech and writing in 1600 were recognizably informed by the discourse network of their own moment and by their own concerns with modernity and its origins. So even as I am making an argument about the media constellation of a particular moment (an argument that could perhaps be described as crudely historicist), I am also curious about how the features of that moment became visible under different historical conditions or were imprinted by different media constellations and also how the defamiliarizing effect of the new may have made the past look familiar. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 106-123 [Access article in PDF] The (Mis)Uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique C. Richard King At least since 1979, when W. Arens demystified what he termed "the man-eating myth," cannibalism, once a fundamental feature of the anthropological imagination and a primary trope for interpreting cultural difference, has become subject to serious debate and lingering doubt [see Osborne]. Even as some anthropologists have sought to recuperate (...) anthropophagy as a tangible symbolic, ideological, and ritual complex [Brown and Tuzin; Conklin, "'Thus are our Bodies'"; Forsyth; Harris, Good to Eat 199-234; Sanday], a constellation of scholarly projects and popular works has complicated cannibalism by relocating it in the West. Perhaps most visibly, Hollywood cinema has reclaimed cannibalism. Although a handful of films have revived well-worn clichés of dark-skinned savages preparing to consume Westerners, as in King Solomon's Mines and Crocodile Dundee, others have cast the Western subject as cannibal to grapple with the horrors of reluctant cannibalism, as in Alive! [see Fiddes 121-31], to work through the transgressive and terrifying desires associated with psychopathic cannibalism, as in The Silence of the Lambs [Fuss; Halberstam], and importantly to parody the normative beliefs and behaviors of white, middle-class, heterosexual EuroAmericans, as in Eating Raoul and Parents. At the same time, an array of scholars, artists, and activists have invoked cannibalism to fashion critical perspectives on Western cultural practices. In his film Cannibal Tours (1987), Dennis O'Rourke encourages his audiences to think critically about tourists who travel to the Sepik River Valley to encounter reformed cannibals, asking implicitly who the cannibals are, the Melanesians who formerly (were thought to/claim to have) practiced anthropophagy or the tourists who travel to New Guinea to consume them [see Bruner]. Others have pushed the metaphor. Michael Ames, borrowing explicitly from O'Rourke, uses the cannibal to reframe ethnographic museums and their practices. Similarly, Jane Tompkins asserts that "Museums are a form of cannibalism made safe for polite society" [533]. More generally, Crystal Bartolovich playfully glosses consumerism as the cultural logic of the late cannibalism; bell hooks speaks of the EuroAmerican desires for and incorporation of things ethnic as "eating the other"; and Rosalind Morris suggests that cannibalism is the essential metaphor for late capitalism. More telling, however, are a set of overlapping critical projects that offer detailed theorizations [End Page 106] [Begin Page 108] of contemporary anthropophagy. Here, I will examine three that have had an important impact on discussions of tourism, museums, cultural appropriation, and consumption. Dean MacCannell, in an exciting exploratory review of the documentary Cannibal Tours, makes explicit what O'Rourke left unsaid: we are cannibals, and contemporary capitalism is neocannibalism. Perhaps more radically, Jack Forbes argues that Western civilization fosters cannibalism as an embodied, psychosocial condition or psychosis rooted in exploitation and consumption. Inspired at least in part by Forbes, Deborah Root rethinks Western civilization as cannibal culture.Although I am terribly sympathetic with these perspectives, particularly their political commitments and theoretical creativity, I am disturbed by the practices and effects that animate them. Indeed, as powerful as this critical field promises to be, it is at the same time troubling and dangerous. Although it defamiliarizes practices of cultural production and consumption, it does not enhance understanding of the contexts in which individuals and institutions deploy them and does less to effectively challenge or undermine them. In reframing beliefs and behaviors to accentuate productivity and power, it reinstates and reaffirms binaries and, worse, often turns on the same forms of appropriation.* * *Arguably, flesh eating has always promoted the elaborations of differences. Works central to the Western canon mobilize cannibalism to make (sense of) the world. Herodotus offers an early anthropophagic distinction:These Scythian husbandmen then occupy the country eastward for three days' journey.... Beyond this region the country is desert for a great distance; and beyond the desert Androphagi dwell.... The Androphagi have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law. They are nomads and wear a dress like a Scythian; they... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images >> Visual Vertigo:Gaëlle Foray's Homage to the DiscardedAmber Bal (bio)Gaëlle Foray's artistic style invites renewed meditation upon the two human processes that surround the artwork: first, the metamorphosis of raw materials into aesthetic object at the hands of the artist, and second, the phenomenology of perceiving art. On the side of reception (in other words, the viewer's experience of Foray's works), the artworks demand first to be felt. (...) Only following an immediate visceral "strike" of abstract, unfocused perception, does the analytical eye proceed to examine these intricate works up close, parsing their immense and meticulous detail. On the side of artistic creation, Foray's methods elicit questions about the artist's relationship to Earth's finite materials, to the tension between environmental awareness and our own extractive practices. Foray's response to issues of waste and consumption at the heart of artistic endeavors is that she exclusively uses discarded materials; a form of recycling, gleaning, and/or foraging in the lived world. Yet, her approach is distinct from the well-established use of objet trouvés ("found objects") in modern art. Unlike "anti-artworks" such as Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fontaine (a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt") or Piero Manzoni's 1961 Merda d'artista, both of which offer "common objects" in their original state for aesthetic contemplation, Foray's works are not "readymades." As opposed to what Steven Goldsmith describes as Duchamp's "subordinat[ion] of form to concept," Foray manipulates and defamiliarizes her recycled artistic material through processes of collage and bricolage.1 She describes the transformation of collected objects as a means of "paying homage to waste," from natural matter like animal bones, minerals, and fossils to synthetic waste such as long-discarded plastic toys or Tupperware containers, abandoned family photo albums, and démodé dinner party utensils from the eighties.2What emerges from the selection of Foray's works featured in this issue is a clash between the ephemerality of the human lifespan and planetary spatio-temporal dimensions. Her artistic process forces vertiginous acknowledgement of the fragility of human existence as it presses up against that which the human tries to capture through art: the world. What's more, Earth's monumental landscapes only ever figure as and in fragments. Two specific conflicts return across Foray's works to create this sense of vertigo. First is the contrast between the limited human lifespan and the eternity of the fossil; as the latter is often figured alongside photographs of humans or man-made materials in a manner that draws attention to this unfathomably large geological temporal scale. A secondary contrast arises from Foray's recurrent human-nature juxtaposition as the boundedness of human life continually knocks up against raw and unruly natural matter. Foray's recourse to diverse textures and materials heightens these oppositions—schist lies atop bone, the smooth veneer of a photograph envelops a human form but rests against the jagged edges of a stone. As we shall explore through ruminations on specific pieces, her method prompts inquiry into the relationship between these human [End Page 110] and geological timescales, attesting Foray's remarkable ability to capture brevity and limitlessness in tandem. Of equal note is Foray's repeated, self-reflexive wink to art's mediation of the world through a "framing effect," as she regularly makes the protective screen of a work or staging of an exhibition space integral to the artwork itself. This is her own means of drawing attention to the conditions in which the work of art is encountered, both exaggerating the distantiating function of the frame in classical art which "served to make [artwork] discontinuous with its surroundings" and building upon the "readymade" tradition's abolition of the barrier between viewer and artwork.3Foray's pieces, composed from an amalgam of natural matter and industrial or household waste, operate as self-contained ecosystems that are akin to stumbling upon a diorama that has escaped from its box, or a snowglobe whose glass sphere has been shattered and from which the liquid has drained away. In La Mer (see pages 34/35), the background's glitter and the iridescent blues... (shrink)

Taking my cue from Judith Schalanskys 2018 work Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, I discuss the striking presence of lists and list-like, enumerative structures in contemporary literature. As a poetic principle, the use of lists and enumerations becomes a means of defamiliarizing the mundane and familiar, and at the same time also shows a preoccupation with existential issues.

In contrast to the thesis of a thorough homology between the demystifying vocation of modernism and the profanatory tendencies of capitalist dynamics, the work of Roberto Schwarz seems to provide elements for a more nuanced conception of the modernist experience. While denouncing the setback caused by the routinisation of artistic strategies of defamiliarization, the Brazilian critic remains reluctant to accept the postmodernist assumption that any attempt to give consequence to the modernist universe in changed circumstances is necessarily doomed to (...) failure. To be sure, works that uncritically reproduce modernist tropes and tactics of representing reality in a dislocated way in order to provoke surprise, as advertisements do, are indeed bound to falter. But as long as they let themselves be informed at every stage by a critical inadequacy to the commodified world, modernist approaches may retain a critical value within an increasingly virulent anti-modernist culture. (shrink)

If Milton is the grand expositor of human culture as a middle realm, Williams can be seen as in many respects his secular heir, an heir careful to work out how the poetic imagination serves to make man's expulsion from Edenic origins bearable and even invigorating. Williams' poetics begins, as Riddel makes clear, in the awareness that there is no inherent or even recoverable correspondence between words and facts in the world, but Williams then devotes most of his energies to (...) denying the metaphysical alternative to that position—the claim that all language can do is reflect on and play with the emptiness or fictiveness of its signifiers. If words do not copy but produce meanings, then they can be used significantly to focus our attention on the activities of the artist and his constructed characters as they engage in that process of production. The act of producing meanings can be the process by which to achieve another kind of reference, for the act of expression can itself become the focus generating a poem's significance by calling attention to the various ways authors and characters station themselves in relation to specific situations. Fiction then is not so much a term describing the ontological status of certain kinds of language but a term characterizing a particular way of using language to reflect upon forms of behavior in which we are not fully conscious of the quality of our activities. Williams' position on the artist's language is clearest in his frequent metaphor of the artist as farmer. The initial activity of both men is a kind of violence, an assertion of the difference between human desires and indifferent "blank fields." But what begins as antagonism does not result in the creation of self-referential fictive structures or the gay wisdom of maintaining and disseminating differences. Rather antagonism is the precondition for what Williams richly labels "composition": the farmer-poet organizes the blank field into a fertile, life-sustaining set of relationships which are not simply linguistic.1 · 1. Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott , pp. 98-99. Williams' image of arts as antagonistic composing has important parallels with the Russian Formalist concept of "defamiliarization," but for Williams it is not simply a scene but a total human act that is revealed by this process. Charles Altieri teaches modern literature and literary theory in the English department at the University of Washington. The author of Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry of the 1960s, he has just completed a study of literary meaning. "Culture and Skepticism: A Response to Michael Fischer" was contributed to Critical Inquiry in the Winter 1979 issue. (shrink)

I adapt Robert Sinnerbrink's notion of cinematic poesis by arguing that Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line constitutes an example of ecological cinematic poesis: a style of filmmaking that works in concert with the limits and potentialities of the filmmaking as a medium. This cinematic bearing emerges in a new way following Malick's return to Hollywood, where a combination of factors spur the emergence of a radical Emersonian practice of cinematic receptivity. I draw on oral histories, and the film itself, (...) to demonstrate how Malick's creative process consistently tends towards an ethos of poverty. To further pattern and illuminate the ecological stakes of this Emersonian stance, I draw on the complementary framework of second-order systems theory, and in particular, on Niklas Luhmann's concept of simultaneity. In so doing, I outline the layered nature of Malick's cinematic praxis – a doubled Emersonian receptivity which not only invites defamiliarizing depictions of warfare and the nonhuman, but also welcomes, and toys with, the otherness haunting technical images and human cognition. As such, The Thin Red Line, and its immediate counterparts, perform the ecological work of reframing the conditions of wonder, asking us to marvel not at what we have seen, but what we haven’t. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 3-18 [Access article in PDF] Grounds of Comparison Pheng Cheah Reflection is born of the comparison of ideas, and it is their variety that leads us to compare them. Whoever sees only a single object has no occasion to make comparisons. Whoever sees only a small number and always the same ones from childhood on still does not compare them, because the habit of seeing them (...) deprives him of the attention required to examine them: but as a new object strikes us, we want to know it, we look for relations between it and the objects we do know; this is how we learn to observe what we see before us, and how what is foreign to us leads us to examine what touches us.Apply these ideas to the first men, you will see the reason for their barbarism. Never having seen anything other than what was around them, they did not know even it; they did not know themselves. They had the idea of a Father, a son, a brother, but not of man. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of LanguagesIn recent years, the comparative study of cultural formations has undergone critical reinvigoration. The quasi-exponential globalization of all aspects of human existence, which has brought territorially divided or geographically bounded units such as states, national economies, and cultures into an unprecedented and jarring proximity to one another, is, no doubt, an important material condition of possibility of this heightened interest in the cultural branch of comparative studies. For comparison is today no longer a matter of intentional choice. The gradual defamiliarization of our daily lives by globalizing processes has made comparison an inevitable and even unconscious perspective.Indeed, the grounds of comparison have changed. Comparative work is generally understood as a mode of analysis that begins from one given national or cultural case of a subject of legitimate interest, X, which is the basis for forming a provisional hypothesis or working idea about this subject that serves as the tertium comparationis. One then proceeds to examine a range of other cases of X. Discovered similarities confirm or amplify the various essential features of X that were initially posited, and recognized differences serve to modify our working idea about X. A ground of comparison is therefore both the empirical or objective basis from which comparison begins as well as the interest or principle of reason that motivates each particular activity of comparison.In the past, the grounds of comparison were undeniably Eurocentric. Not only was the material starting point of comparison always from Europe or the North Atlantic; comparison also had a teleological aim. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the interests of comparison in canonical texts such as Hegel's Aesthetics; his Lectures on the Philosophy of History; and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion; or Max Weber's sociology of world religions served to affirm a certain idea of Europe as a world historical model. For Hegel and Weber, other cases merely provided the mise-en-scène for the appearance and Bildung of this idealized, universalized figure of Europe. Today, in the humanities [End Page 3] and interpretive social sciences, this old framework for comparison has been challenged by critiques of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, by postcolonial studies, and also from the more parochial perspective of multiculturalism. One can no longer nonchalantly or dogmatically start a comparative endeavor from Europe or the North Atlantic. But the problem goes deeper. Many theorists and some funding bodies, including the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) of the USA, have recently suggested that post-Cold War transnationalism has rendered obsolete the traditionally bounded areas of area studies. If this is so, the claim to begin from any area outside the North Atlantic has also become problematic. In other words, if comparison has always presupposed geographical or cultural areas that are a priori distinct and to be compared, how must the grounds of comparison be reenvisioned?The work of Benedict Anderson stands in an oblique relation to such recent trends in humanistic studies. Although Anderson is an area specialist, a Southeast Asianist trained in political studies, his... (shrink)

Tom Moylan is perhaps most famous as a literary critic of science fiction: his two most well-known collections of reviews were Demand the Impossible, published in 1986 and reissued in 2014 with a number of critical reactions appended, and Scraps of the Untainted Sky, originally published in 2000. At any rate, the topic with Becoming Utopian is utopia, utopia as an abstract notion, influenced by the writings of Ernst Bloch, Ruth Levitas, Fredric Jameson, and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. (...) Moylan's focus in these books is consistently upon the defamiliarization promoted by certain ideas of utopia, opening to the reader the possibility of conceiving different subject positions. As the preface to Scraps... (shrink)

Automation is once again raising concerns about the threat it poses to employment. Feminists in the 20th century believed that technology could liberate women from undesirable labor. However, historically, industry and automation have not reduced women’s workloads but have instead favored unpaid work, flexibility, and work overload. Rather than mitigating the care and ecological crises, technological development has exacerbated them. This raises an important question for feminist theory: should technology be rejected as a way of reducing women’s workload? To explore (...) this, we analyze classical and contemporary contributions from feminist theorists on the future of work and technology. Using philosophical and feminist theoretical methods, our aim is to examine the relationships between these imaginings and home, family, design, and consumption. This article argues that a feminist analysis of work must include the technological dimension, considering the production of human beings as a strategic technology for feminist purposes. To imagine an alternative near future, the article draws on Donna Haraway’s making kin, emphasizing defamiliarization and refamiliarization of social and ecological relations, pluralist science, and technology for sustainable regeneration of life; and finally, as suggested in this analysis, the ironic persistence of labour in a post-industrial or post-capitalist era. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fellini's Crowds and the Remains of ReligionAndrew Mckenna (bio)The fascist parade in Federico Fellini's Amarcord enables us to take the measure of the director's analytic and inteve genius. It begins amid swirls of dust and smoke emanating from the town train station, as if attributing the successful spread of Italian fascism to a failure of perception. The party is, as the saying goes, blowing smoke in our face, producing (...) a cultural climate favorable to murky thinking. The haze connotes the inability to properly envision phenomena with any mental or moral clarity, to distinguish matters clearly, such as the difference that the film suggests in a later scene, with comic irony, between a real military victory and shooting a gramophone out of a bell tower because it is playing the communist Internationale.But we cannot get away with anything like blaming fascism only on the weather, moral or physical. Far more revealing is the next sequence of shots, in which local party officials and members, all in uniform, are shown running a little breathlessly in loose formation, while exchanging remarks that express gleeful admiration of their leader and his party. They hustle up some stairs in the same loose formation and stand facing the camera, medium close-up, in order to acclaim the party slogans booming from loudspeakers. They shout in unison before, we note, the slogans are fully pronounced, so that we are made aware that they are not really listening to what is being said, but only acting in concert. Their acclamation is comically out of sync—with reality, perceptual and, by implication, social. This image of the bersaglieri running in unison is familiar to spectators at political rallies and from newsreels at the time, and to historians since then. But Fellini has moved the camera in closer than it has ever been before, combining two or three characters in a head-shot as they trot up the street. It is a classic gesture of defamiliarization, as the Russian formalists called it when identifying art-work, that makes this phenomenon available to deeper understanding. [End Page 159]We have just viewed a penetrating analysis of group action, a symbolic discourse on crowd behavior as it concerns organized political activity. The running here is not natural to such a group; it must mean something. It isn't dictated to them as orders; it must obey the dictates of the phenomenon that Fellini is revealing to us. This brilliantly orchestrated scene prompts the question: why, when, for what reason does a crowd run? The answers, typically, are two: in fear, in panic, as from fire or flood; or in rage, in fury, as against an abhorred enemy culprit—to the Bastille, or the gallows, or the nearest tree or lamppost that can serve as such. Though it is closer to the second case, Fellini's gang of fascists fits neither of these models precisely, and we have to step back a bit and reflect upon what he is representing to us about crowd behavior and organized political activity of a certain kind, of the kind that can only succeed, perhaps, amid a hazy climate of moral perception. We need to probe further the logic of this phenomenon, to explore the meaning of what appears before our eyes, as the philosophers do when they say they are doing phenomenology. We can do this by further considering alternative models of behavior.In a military parade, we have an organized crowd of a certain specific type, in which a group is massed in rigid formation and everyone moves in lock-step order to the regular beat of the drum or to a repeated count of numbers. Fellini gives us an example of this in the fascist youth athletic exercises performed by uniformed groups of boys and girls who move their rifles and hoops to a steady eight-count beat. So we know the director of Amarcord is thinking about mass movements of all sorts. Moreover, his film also provides us with a crowd phenomenon at the opposite end of the social spectrum. At the beginning of the film, we witness the nightly passagiata, the evening town stroll still very... (shrink)

This paper investigates the dilemma that has been projected upon Indian female dancers’ bodies by contemporary Indian audiences when female desire occupies the centrality of a performance and projects the female body as sexual, articulate and independent of the discipline and propriety of classicism. Locating this dilemma in the nationalist construction of Indian womanhood and femininity as ‘chaste’, this paper adopts Victor Turner's notions of liminal and liminoid phenomenon and Brechtian defamiliarization technique as a feminist strategy to construct a (...) framework within which the contemporary Indian dancer can reclaim her sexuality in performance. To investigate the complex nationalist trope of chaste Indian womanhood, and to analyse the subversion of this trope by placing agency on the female body as sexual, I locate my argument in the discussion of The Silk Route: Memory of a Journey by Kinaetma Theatre, UK, which was performed in Kolkata in August 2004. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 230—233. A word about the quotation marks. People ask about them, in the beginning; in the process of giving themselves up to reading the poem, they become comfortable with them, without necessarily thinking precisely about why they’re there. But they’re there, mostly to measure the poem. The phrases they enclose are poetic feet. If I had simply left white spaces between the phrases, the phrases would be read too fast for my musical intention. The quotation marks make (...) the reader slow down and silently articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and with the stresses, I intend. They also distance the narrative form myself. I am not Alette. Finally they may remind the reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice: this is not a thought, or a record of thought process, this is a story, told.(1) We read (reread) the poems that keep the discourse with ourselves going. —Wallace Stevens We have to break open words or sentences, too, and find what’s uttered in them. —Gilles Deleuze “The Descent of Alette” “is an allegorical poem” “in four books” “first published” “in 1992” “by Alice Notley.” “In the Descent of Alette,” “the double quotation mark” “is wrapped around” “words, phrases, sometimes whole sentences, and utilized as bones for structure and tonality.” “The winged” “dbl quotation” “like angels or devils” “descending from elsewhere” “function as” “poetic feet.” “Distance” “in the text through the use of dbl quotes,” “according to Notley,” “was a way to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” I know someone who tattooed double quotes on her shoulder blades. In other words, the body is quotable. To be able to say that one is quotable. A body filled with other’s sayings. I never asked her what for, what is the double quote tattoo for and why on the shoulder blades? I prefer my own interpretation that keeps shifting every time I see her. First words of every poem in every book: Book One One ... On ... A ... There ... I ... We ... An ... A ... A ... I ... At ... A ... When ... When ... There ... I ... In ... At ... I ... Once ... A ... A ... In ... A ... A ... Two ... I ... I ... Eyeball ... In ... I... A ... I ... I ... On ... I ... There ... What ... As ... As Book Two I ... When ... I ... I ... As ... I ... I ... There ... I ... There ... I ... A ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I Book Three The ... Presently ... I ... I’m ... I ... We ... What ... My ... I ... Who ... But ... Lay ... My ... I ... The ... Your ... The ... I ... It’s ... As ... The ... Talon’s ... When ... We ... I ... Slowly ... I ... I ... The ... How ... The Book Four I ... I ... You ... The ... Now ... She ... The ... There ... As ... Then ... The ... All ... Let’s I ... You ... The ... Thus ... The ... I ... The ... I ... There ... Have ... The ... As ... The Defamiliar Object “Poetry is a defamiliarized language, whose formations, so far from being simply formations of meaning, are aesthetic structures...”(2) “The same can be” “irresponsibly associated” “with the use of punctuation.” “The dbl quotation as a measure” “of poetic feet” “is treated as such” “because the author” “injects artfulness into it.” “The dbl quote is an object—” “a joystick” “to control breadth” “(of breath.)” “To de-familiarize” “said sign” “is also to” “impart the sensation of [it] as [it is] perceived and not as they are known.”(3) “The dbl quote” “nests previous words, phrasings and sayings.” “How many have come and gone” “through the doorway of this punctuation sign.” “There are also air quotes and virtual quotes.” “There is emphasis and there’s irony.” “It would be aggravating” “or interesting” “to watch a reading of” “The Descent of Alette” “with someone” “raising and curling” “fingers” “bent out of shape” “in what could be used as” “peace signs.” “I am trying to avoid” “scare quotes.” “I looked up” “what they are” “and supposedly they arose” “in the early 20th century.” “The scare quote” “is a mark around a word or phrase to indicate that it doesn’t signify conventional or literal meaning.” “This isn’t how Notley” “intended to use them” “in The Descent of Alette.” “The characters, places, and things” “signify nothing” “beyond” “their literal meaning” “ within the allegory .” “I’d like to stress” “within the allegory;” “that’s why its” “italicized.” “It is told through” “the main character/voice of” “Alette.” “The author reminds us she is not Alette.” “The author marvelously found a way” “to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” “This was attempted” “by tonal and intimate” “affect of the dbl quote” “used as poetic feet.” “Its as though” “punctuation in this regard” “becomes a magical toy.” “Arguably, punctuation” “(as perceived)” “undergoes a kind of” “ defamiliar ” “make-over.” “The text” gently forces the reader” “to slow down,” “read slowly.” “At some point” “one begins to sense” “lines of text” “moving on its own.” “Broken words, phrases, and sentences” “shuttling left to right” “like a subway” “that stops” “from station to station;” “open quote to end quote.” Double Quote Occupied “There are two worlds; one above ground” “and one underground.” “The world above ground is where,” “the tyrant” “with a capital t” “lives.” “(The “T” gets tangled in the claws of the dbl quote.)” “Alette becomes an owl and kills him.” “In the last book the tyrant dies.” “ “...the tyrant” “a man in charge of” “the fact” “that we were” “below the ground” “endlessly riding” “our trains, never surfacing” “A man who” “would make you pay” “so much” “to leave the subway” “that you don’t” “ever ask” “how much it is” “It is, in effect,” “all of you & more” “Most of which you already” “pay to live below” “But he would literally” “take your soul” “Which is what you are” “below the ground” “Your soul” “your soul rides” “this subway” “I saw” “on the subway a” “world of souls” ”(4) “New York;” “the city of cities” “and its subways—” “worlds underground,” “above ground,” “& above the above ground.” “Skyscrapers,” “Wall Street,” “old money,” “new money,” “and falling further down a cleavage;” “the middle class” “slipping away.” “Contemporary artist ” “Ligorano Reece” “recently made” “a sculpture of ice ” “a block of ice” “carved to read” “middle class” “(in all upper case letters)” “and let it melt” “naturally” “for however long—” “hours,” “days.” “It didn’t take very long to melt.” A global uprise of mass demonstrations; a cacophony of bodies on the street, in parks and universities, on City Hall lawns, coastal ports, neighborhoods, etc., and for what? The reasons are endless and finite. Not a single body is unaffected by the movement even when not “occupying.” “Occupiers” “stormed into a Sotheby’s auction” “protesting” “via human microphone” “that the CEO takes home” “about” “six thousand dollars” “a day.” “(The a/Art market” “is not a reflection” “of a desire” “for a/Art” “but a reflection” “of a desire” “for money” “confused with a/Art.)” What could it mean to occupy that which has been written or said? Someone with double quotes tattooed on both shoulders attempts to reclaim the sign; re-invent it privately-publicly since the body is always split between both spheres. A genre of hide-and-seek; the speaking and silent body which can never mean what it says even while it so desires to mean something. To nest (and hold hostage) someone in double quotes is an act of violence; a gesture of displacement where one is arrested, dislocated, and scrutinized under a distant gaze. “The air quote” “also known as” “finger quote or ersatz quote” “supposedly” “harks back to” “1927.” “The brevity of this gesture” “ as something invisible” “like virtual money or credit” “doesn’t really exist” “though it take up space;” “its the ghostliest of all punctuation signs” “and one that requires the presence and appearance of a body.” “ “she made a form” “in her mind” “an imaginary” “form” “to settle” “in her arms where” “the baby” “had been” “We saw her fiery arms” “cradle air” “She cradled air...” ”(5) “The air” “gets occupied” “by one or two hands” “with thumb, forefinger, and middle finger” “which alternately could be used” “to shoot rubber bullets,” “pepper spray,” “tear gas.” “How three fingers” “could be responsible for so much:” “satire, sarcasm, irony” “and ultimately” “bruises, blood, death.” (“The violence of the dbl quote is to eagerly to place oneself inside a tornado.)” “The violence of this” “embodied punctuation mark” “stems from a discordance with others.” “Is the name, word, or phrase” “placed in dbl quotes” “heroic” “ or brave?” “An act of displacement;” “must there always be” “bright or negative lights—” “a leaderless act” “to inhabit, to occupy” “space removed” “from normative use.” “Of course” “I’m also wondering” “what it means to re-occupy” “public/private space—the street, neighborhood or page” “policed” “by laws, limits, and” “to some extent” “punctuation.” Echo, Mirror “There are first, second, and third voices interwoven.” “ “Braid of voices,”(6) ” “Some lines read as internal thoughts,” “dialogues,” “and scene descriptions,” “all of which make up the allegory.” “It seems appropriate” “for the word” “allegory” “to nest in dbl quotes” “for perhaps it might be” “a gesture to echo on and on” “eternally referencing” “whatever came before.” I notice the first tooth of the double quote, when paying too close attention, gets caught in the hook of the “f”. I space bar to untangle them; the f does not resist the closed bite of “deaf” and I resist to know what it could mean, because it could doubly mean nothing. “ “He looked” “so familiar” “to me...”(7) ” “The second-person” “echoes in one of two directions:” “further into” “or farther from” “me.” “Its as though” “the second-person amplifies” “or else the opposite” “in which he,” “who looks so familiar,” “retreats further” “like stars in a telescope.” “The dbl quote” “has this kind of affect” “concerning distance and dimension” “as also illusory” “as something twice removed” “and unreal” “in a similar way” “movie stars are unreal and far away.” “ “I entered” “a car” “in which I seemed” “to see double” “Each person I” “looked at seemed” “spread out” “as if doubled” “Gradually” “I perceived that” “each person” “was surrounded by a ghostly” “second image” “was encased in it” “& each” / “of those images,” “those encasings,” “was exactly the same” “each was in fact” “the tyrant...” ”(8) A daydream of a mirror-less world while staring through window blinds; a palm tree behind. It was dark with nothing there. A world with no mirrors “in my mind,” though my mind could only reflect what it knew: a palm tree. Naturally then, palm trees multiplied; a world of palm trees reflected the daydream with no mirror in sight. “The mirror” “(prior to obsidian manufacturing ca. 6000 B.C)” “was wherever water” “could be found.” “Its interesting” “mirrors have been around” “before humans—its funny” “animals and humans” “get born into” “a world of mirrors,” “therefore, simulation” “is always already” “a given—” “a sparkly consequence to be born with a dbl.” NOTES 1. Notley, Alice. “Author’s Note” in The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996) 2. Bruns, Gerald L. “ From Intransitive Speech to the Universe of Discourse” in Modern Poetry And The Idea of Language (New Haven & London, 1974), p.75 3. Ibid. p.77 4. Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996). p.3 5. Ibid. p.10 6. Ibid i. p.9 7. Ibid ii. p.16 8. Ibid iii. p.12. (shrink)

Abstract:What would Wittgensteinian fiction—not overtly about or influenced by him, but that resonates with his thought—look like? Lydia Davis has avowed, but never explained, her admiration for Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her short and fragmentary fictions are attuned to how grammar and usage reveal our forms of life. Alongside briefer discussion of Adam Ehrlich Sachs and other contemporary American writers, I characterize both Wittgenstein and Davis as uncanny grammarians: though we live in language, we are never fully at home in it. Both (...) press on our ordinary language in an extraordinary way, defamiliarizing the familiar to more explicitly understand it. (shrink)

"I am a Jew who was born and who grew up in a Catholic country; I never had a religious education; my Jewish identity is in large measure the result of persecution." This brief autobiographical statement is a key to understanding Carlo Ginzburg's interest in the topic of his latest book: distance. In nine linked essays, he addresses the question: "What is the exact distance that permits us to see things as they are?" To understand our world, suggests Ginzburg, it (...) is necessary to find a balance between being so close to the object that our vision is warped by familiarity or so far from it that the distance becomes distorting. Opening with a reflection on the sense of feeling astray, of familiarization and defamiliarization, the author goes on to consider the concepts of perspective, representation, imagery, and myth. Arising from the theme of proximity is the recurring issue of the opposition between Jews and Christians -- a topic Ginzburg explores with an impressive array of examples, from Latin translations of Greek and Hebrew scriptures to Pope John Paul II's recent apology to the Jews for antisemitism. Moving with equal acuity from Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius to Montaigne to Voltaire, touching on philosophy, history, philology, and ethics, and including examples from present-day popular culture, the book offers a new perspective on the universally relevant theme of distance. (shrink)

The formalist linguists are of the opinion that the literary language is formed by polishing and foregrounding the practiced slang. Many of this literary tricks used in foregrounding are categorized; but there exist some literary tricks that have not been dealt with and are not named or addressed in the available categories. The attempt is made in this study to find an answer to the questions that why has Mandanipour in his masterpiece, “Shargh-e Banafshe” achieved a superior language that is (...) outstanding among his colleagues of the same era and has become a model in advanced language for the writers to come based on adopting defamiliarization theory in the Leech foregrounding format? Assessing the language of this unique work indicates that in addition to introducing an innovation in the usual styles in contemporary writing and the themes he has allowed assimilation and metaphor and other obsolete styles in his language; and yet has used special literary tricks that have never been tried or tested before. This approach has pat language in story writing to a high position. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 76–81 Comments on Eugene Thacker’s “Cosmic Pessimism” Nicola Masciandaro Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has. —Vernon Howard In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. The cosmicity of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “ Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core ” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates (...) the sigh that issues from my heart]. 1 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of the soul’s eventual exit from the dead body’s mouth, the sigh restores consciousness to the funeral of being, to the passing away that is existence. Pessimism speaks in piercing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.” 2 … pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. To the pessimist, the ‘real’ world—the world on whose behalf we are expected to wake up in the morning—is a ceaseless index of its own unreality. The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. These two paths are distinguished by their relation to pessimism’s guilt vis-à-vis the world’s reality-project. The first form, that which remains pessimism for the world and puts on a smiling face, stays guilty to itself (i.e. unconscious) and thus turns hypocritical, becoming at once the pessimism of the commoner who really just wants things to be better for himself and the pessimism of the elite who wants to critically refashion reality in his own image. The general form of this worldly, hypocritical pessimism is the impulse to ‘make the world a better place’, which is the global mask under which the world is diurnally made worse. The second form, that which follows pessimism away from the world and ceases to put on a smiling face, refuses guiltiness as itself theessential Occidental mode of pretense and turns honest, becoming at once the intelligent pessimism required of all ordinary action and the radical pessimism necessary for self-knowledge: seeing that no one is capable of doing good. The general form of this universal, honest pessimism is the impulse not to worry, to give up and embrace dereliction, which is the only real way the world is actually improved. Where worldly pessimism is the engine productive of interminably warring secular and sacred religions (good-projects), universal pessimism strives hopelessly for the paradise of a supremely instantiated pessimus: things are getting so bad that there is no longer any time for them to get worse; things are so constantly-instantly worst that this is BEST. Cosmic pessimism is the mode of universal pessimism which can yet discourse with the world, which has not chosen silence and can spread the inconceivably BAD NEWS in an orderly form ( kosmos ) that the world can understand (if it wanted to). … the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world. That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world). … a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. Pessimism’s love of fate is a blind love, a love of the blindness of being human in a cosmos conceived around the human’s eclipse, a heavy levitation in the contradictory space between the inescapability of its having been and the impossibility of its will-be. Pessimism’s song of futility is a sensible way of loving fate, with a minimum of eros, by means of a kind of matrimonial love of the fatal. As music, pessimism stays open to the irreparable and the inexorable without the binding of affirmation, in the apparent absence of the radical, infinitely surplus will that absolute amor fati seems to require. Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? “Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will scarcely be worth the trouble of his achieving it. We should aspire to the impossible, to absolute and infinite perfection [….] The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a norm of action, it is a beacon for high deeds [….] For true charity is a species of invasion [….] It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to anguish and torment of spirit.” 3 … the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought. “The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself [….] There are no arguments [….] On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos [….] I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing .” 4 It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. According to the earliest account of Cecilia’s martyrdom, the beheading turns out worse. After not severing her head in three strokes, “the cruel executioner left her half dead” (seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit). 5 Cecilia’s effortlessly powerful endurance of the three strokes—a fitting icon for pessimism as an art of dereliction—demonstrates the “passivity and absence of effort [….] in which divine transcendence is dissolved.” 6 There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. Like words from a pre-waking dream. There is no reason to think that they are not. NOTES 1. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova . ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 2. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan . trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 3. Miguel de Unamuno. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations . trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. 305-6. 4. E.M. Cioran. On the Heights of Despair . trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. 9-10. 5. Giacomo Laderchi. S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . Rome. 1723. 38. 6. Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche . trans. Bruce Boone. London: Continuum. 2004. 135. See Nicola Masciandaro. “ Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia .” A Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s "Cosmic Pessimism" Gary J. Shipley Pessimism is the refusal to seek distraction, the refusal to remodel failure into a platform for further (doomed) possibilities, the refusal of comfort, the acceptance of the sickness of healthy bodies, the cup of life overflowing with cold vomit. If, as Ligotti suggests when discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1 humans prefer the anxieties of their familiar human lives to the contentment of an alien one, then the pessimist, we could argue, represents some perverted combination of the two, preferring (presuming he has a choice) the defamiliarization of human life to the contentment of its unquestioned mundanity. The quasi-religious state of mind that Wittgenstein would mention on occasion, that of “feeling absolutely safe,” 2 is a state the pessimist could only imagine being approximated by death, or perhaps some annihilative opiate-induced stupor. This Wittgensteinian commingling of certainty and faith looks every bit the futile gesture, a mere rephrasing of collapse or partial collapse. The only certainty open to the pessimist is that of the toxic formula of life itself—a formula known and lacuna-free. Certainty, far from being the gateway to deliverance, becomes the definitive impediment; and the possibility of salvation, as long as it remains, becomes crucially reliant on postulations of ignorance, epistemic gaps, a perennial incompleteness: “the perfect safety of wooed death […] the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown.” 3 The height of Leibniz’s Panglossian insanity nurtured the idea that our knowing everything—via the universal calculus—could be accurately described a triumph, as opposed to a nightmare in which our every futility is laid bare. Stagnancy and boredom are perhaps two of the greatest ills of Western civilisation, and the most potent pessimism tells you that you’re stuck with both. The most we can hope for, by way of salvation, is to throw open our despair to the unknown. The fact that Schopenhauer’s pessimism stopped short of morality and allowed him to play the flute, as Nietzsche complained, highlights the predicament of a man who despite having adorned nothingness with a smiling face still found himself alive. The demand here is that it be felt: a cross-contamination of intellect and emotion. The safety net of numerous parentheses makes for a failed philosophy, rather than a philosophy of failure. Depressives make bad pessimists, because, unless they choose to die, living will always infect them with necessities of hope, forcing them to find something, anything (all the various “as ifs”) to make existence tolerable. For as Cioran observed, while “[d]epressions pay attention to life, they are the eyes of the devil, poisoned arrows which wound mortally any zest and love of life. Without them we know little, but with them, we cannot live.” 4 And even when cured of our depressions we’ll find ourselves consumed, eaten alive by the hyper-clinical (borderline autistic) mania that replaces them: a predicament captured all too clearly in the microscriptual fictions of Robert Walser, where spectral men and women stifle their depressive madness with protective comas of detail, their failed assimilations buried beneath thick crusts of remote data. Like Beckett’s Malone their stories may have ended, but cruelly their lives have not. Pessimism is an extraneous burden (a purposeless weight) that makes everything else harder to carry, while at the same time scooping it out and making it lighter. If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh non-noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world’s last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that “he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now.” 5 The pessimist suffers a derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of his being: he’s the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see him. If Cioran’s refusal is manifested in sleep (when even saying ‘no’ is too much of a commitment), then Pessoa’s resides in the dreams inside that sleep. Pessoa chooses to exploit the fact that he’s being “lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied” 6 by growing more voids to live him. His is a Gnostic breed of sleep, “sleeping as if the universe were a mistake,” 7 a sleep that dreams through Thacker’s cosmic pessimism (“a pessimism of the world-without-us.”, “the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time” 8 ), through the critical error of there being anything at all when there could be nothing. The metaphysical pessimist is someone who, however well life treats them, still desires to wake from it, as from the poisonous air of a bad dream. Pessimism is a paradox of age, being simultaneously young and old; its youth residing in a refusal to accept the authority of existence (its rich history, its inherent beneficence), a refusal to “get over” the horror of what it sees with its perpetually fresh eyes, and its maturity in the unceremonious disposal of the philosophical playthings (those futile architectures) of adolescence. As Thacker remarks: “Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.” 9 A sentiment shared with Pessoa, who duly categorizes those that choose to enact this futile struggle: “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering.” 10 If the pessimist has shared a womb with anyone, it’s with the mystic and not the philosopher. As Schopenhauer tells us: “The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. […] But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.” 11 The crucial difference between the mystic and the pessimist is not the latter’s impassivity and defeatism, but his unwillingness/inability to contain in any way the spread of his voracious analyticity, his denial of incompleteness, his exhaustive devotion to failure. The truth of our predicament, though heard, is destined to remain unprocessed. Like the revelations of B.S. Johnson’s Haakon (“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that?” 12 ) the pessimist’s truths are somehow too obvious to listen to, as if something inside us were saying, “Of course, but haven’t we gotten over that?” Pessimism is simple and ugly, and has no desire to make itself more complex or more attractive. The true moral pessimist knows that the Utilitarian’s accounts will always be in the red. He can see that for all his computational containments, his only honest path is a negative one, and that such a path has but one logical destination: that of wholesale human oblivion. Thacker notes how at the core of pessimism lies the notion of “the worst,” through which death is demoted by the all-pervasive suffering of a life that easily eclipses its threat. And so with doom made preferable to gloom, death begins to glint with promise, “like beauty passing through a nightmare.” 13 But even among pessimists suicide is, for the most part, thought to be an error. Schopenhauer, for instance, regarded suicide a mistake grounded in some fundamentally naïve disappointment or other. Pessoa too thought suicide an onerous escape tactic: “To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” 14 There is a call here to be accepting of and creative with the puppetry of your being, an insistence that it’s somehow a blunder to attempt to hide in death from the horrors you find inlife. 15 Tied up with this perseverance is the slippery notion of the good death, for maybe, as Blanchot warns, suicide is rarely something we can hope to get right, for the simple reason that “you cannot make of death an object of the will.” 16 “Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete,” 17 and this is not simply because the project itself belies something yet to be disclosed, but because the project itself is a thing waiting. It waits on a cure it knows will not come, but for which it cannot do anything (as long as it continues to do anything) but wait. NOTES 1. See Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . New York: Hippocampus Press. 2010. 91. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review . (74) 1. 1965. 8. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire . New York: Vintage. 1989. 221. 4. E. M. Cioran. The Book of Delusions . trans. Camelia Elias. Hyperion. 5.1. (2010): 75. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 609. 6. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 67. 7. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 35. 8. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 68. 9. Ibid. 73. 10. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 341. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 610-11. 12. B.S Johnson. “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.” in Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson . London: Picador. 2004. 177. 13. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 415. 14. Ibid. 199. 15. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Anne Sexton. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose . ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1985. 92. 16. Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989. 105. 17. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 75. (shrink)

Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs approaches the intentional formation of bodily movement and expression from the various perspectives of individuals who are differently abled. Exploring what it is for a non-dancer to experience various rhythms and movements and spaces with crutches, prosthetic leg, and cane, the essay interweaves phenomenological description and interpretation of suddenly defamiliarized daily activities with discourse drawn from the experiences of professional dancers who are differently abled. The aim is to foreground the opacities, transparencies, and (...) ambiguities of a more general sense of embodied and expressive movement that subtends the abled and differently abled and the non-dancer and dancer, and to acknowledge the lived and living body as the common ground that enables all of our thoughts, movements, and modes of expression, however differentiated their myriad forms and satisfactions. (shrink)

Prehistory is an invention of the later nineteenth century. It was in this moment of technological progress and the acceleration of production and circulation, that three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to reckon the age of the Earth; second, to find a point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki's Transfixed by Prehistory considers (...) the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if it was considered through these three, at once consecutive and interwoven, inventions of the longue durée? This book attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than that of an inevitable march of progress leading up to the "Anthropocene." Rather, it's a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration and incessant invention, since the "new" was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed as much of speed as of slowness, as much of change as of deep time, as much of confidence as of skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be thought again. This book focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger) and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst by Mark SchmittJohn StoreyMark Schmitt. Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 147 pp., hardcover, $44.99. ISBN 9783031253508.[End Page 256]What I have called radical utopianism was an important concept for two of the founding figures of British cultural studies, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.1 In 1976, in the revised edition of William (...) Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Thompson introduced into English Miguel Abensour's concept of the "education of desire."2 This has had a profound impact on what has become known as utopian studies but has had hardly any influence on cultural studies. Ruth Levitas together with Thompson (from whom she borrowed the concept) have probably done more than most to make Abensour's formulation popular in critical work on utopianism.3Abensour, however, was almost certainly drawing on part of a point made by William Morris in a letter written in 1884. Morris writes of the teaching of desire and political organization as the two main components necessary to bring about radical change: "The means whereby this is brought about is first, educating people into desiring it, next organising them into claiming it."4 But he also writes of another form of education, what he called "the education of discontent."5 In "Art Under Plutocracy," a lecture given in Oxford in 1883, he explained, "It is my business here to-night and everywhere to foster your discontent … [and] to help in educating that discontent into hope, that is into the demand for the new birth of society."6 He made a similar point in a lecture given in Manchester earlier in 1883:My business herein is to spread discontent. I do not think that this is an unimportant office; for, as discontent spreads, the yearning for bettering the state of things spreads with it, and the longing of many people, when it has grown deep and strong, melts away resistance to change in a sure, steady, unaccountable manner.7The role of the education of discontent is to undermine our sense of the inevitability of the here and now, to make change conceivable and to believe that it is possible, promoting what Raymond Williams calls an "active wanting"—"Possibility, seriously considered, is … not what with luck might happen. It is what we can believe in enough to want, and then, by active wanting, make possible."8 For Morris, the production of utopian desire, as a result of the interrogation of the here and now from the perspective of an alternative social space, would, according to Thompson, "help people to find out their wants, to encourage them to want more, to challenge them to want differently, and to envisage a society of the future in which people, freed at last of necessity, might choose between different wants."9 [End Page 257]Radical utopianism allows us to dare to dream that the way things are is not inevitable—that is, a world arranged in the interest of the powerful few. It broadens our vision of the world and opens up new ways of seeing. As the familiar is defamiliarized, what we have learned to think of as immutable suddenly looks changeable and the capitalist dogma There Is No Alternative can begin to give way to the enabling slogan Another World Is Possible. It allows us to anticipate the possibility of a world in which the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, to slightly misquote them, have a revolutionary insistence: "We are many, they are few."Radical utopianism seeks to free imagination from the limits placed on it by a society run in the interests of the powerful few and to know that these limits are historical. While we seem able to see the past as historical and the future as history waiting to happen, the present seems outside history: in a word, "natural." Radical utopianism makes the present historical. Understood in this way, it is not an attempt to produce blueprints of the perfect society. Given the historical variability of human nature, it is impossible to predict what a perfect society might be like. Instead, radical utopianism is... (shrink)

Woman and Authority in Ian McEwan's "Conversation with a Cupboard Man" and Its Film Adaptation The paper analyzes Ian McEwan's short story "Conversation with a Cup-board Man" and its film adaptation made in Poland by director Mariusz Grzegorzek in 1993. In many works McEwan shows women in more positive light than men. This short story, however, deals with a mother's total domination of her son's life. The text is in the form of first-person narration of the son but it is (...) the figure of the mother that is of utmost importance.The protagonist describes his life from his childhood. His mother wanted him to remain a baby as long as possible, depriving him of free will and leaving him totally dependent on her. Her attitude changed when she found a partner. The protagonist, now seventeen, had rapidly to grow up from a baby into an adult. Childhood and total passivity remain for him ideals to be pursued, and a cramped cupboard becomes his favourite environment. The influence of his upbringing remains with him for ever. After analyzing the short story the paper explores parallels to other works by McEwan and other writers. The importance of the use of the indeterminate article in the title is discussed. Attention is given to the issue of defamiliarization. And the ambivalent attitude of the protagonist towards his mother is examined.The second part of the paper deals with the film adaptation. Grzegorzek has imaginatively developed the short story into a full-blown feature film. It preserves most of the important elements of the short story, at the same time providing new material largely in keeping with the original's tone. The director not only extrapolates, inventing new scenes to fill in the short story's unspoken gaps but also skilfully changes the narrator's comments into scenes, and this is not purely a change from telling into showing. The paper discusses the imagery of the movie, especially Oedipal motifs, references to Christ, and the impression of blood-red lips. It stresses the stronger role of the teacher from the home and his influence on the only independent action of the protagonist—the revenge on Pus-face. It is also important that the film omits any verbal expression of the protagonist's hatred towards his mother. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AfterimagesSvetlana Boym’s Irrepressible CocreationsCristina Vatulescu (bio)[End Page 98]To most people Svetlana Boym was known as a writer: a prolific writer of books marked by originality, insight, and irreverence for intellectual pieties, no matter how fashionable. The media artist side of her that diacritics presents in this issue was chronologically last of her artistic personas. A whole string of these bifurcated the bio blurbs at the end of Svetlana’s monographs. (...) In the first, Death in Quotation Marks (1991), she introduced herself as a playwright and assistant professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. In the second, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), she was also a writer and filmmaker. In her third, most well-known monograph, The Future of Nostalgia (2001), she was again a writer, and this time, full professor at Harvard, but also, as the back cover blurb reminds us, “a native of St. Petersburg who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” “Native” was a word she would have pronounced with an accentuated accent and that she wore as a mask, as another persona. For the record, she did not just write monographs. There is also a novel, Ninochka (2003), that she rewarded herself with writing after receiving tenure at Harvard. After she became a novelist, she also collaborated on a book on Kosmos, the Russian space project and the photographs of its ruins.1 (“Jacob,” her then research assistant recalls her saying one day, “go to the library and find me all the good books on Kosmos.”)2 Her creativity was hard to contain and performative—the whole world was her stage—thus all her authorial and artistic personas. It is just at the end of Another Freedom (2010), her last monograph, that she introduced herself to readers as a media artist.Svetlana’s biographies were not accidental inconsistencies but sustained exercises in self-fashioning, and lately, she told me during our last conversation, self-editing. “There are writers with biographies and writers without biographies,” she often quoted Boris Tomashevsky’s quip as an intriguing prelude to her influential critique of “the death of the author.”3 She launched that critique as the polemic of her dissertation (overseen by Barbara Johnson and formalist scholar Jurij Striedter) in the 1980s, when “the death of the author” had congealed into critical dogma. In the ensuing book, Death in Quotation Marks, she explored the mythologies of the modern poet and critic, including his/her figurative and literal deaths, arguing that the “relationship between texts and life remains a vitally critical issue.”4 She pioneered then her signature critical genre, a writing that would “allow for the incorporation and superimposition of ethical, historical, biographical, and textual issues.”5 At the same time, the book already contains, smuggled inside academic prose, fragments that presage her much later artist’s manifestoes and practices:I wish to preserve the difference between text and life and to avoid subjugating one to the other. In order to open and explore this space of difference we have to trace the ways in which the artistic constructs can, on the one hand, form and inform ordinary experiences and, on the other hand, be deformed and defied by them. This double movement invites us to see literariness or a creative aesthetic impulse in everyday life and to liberate these aesthetic experiences from the confines of “literature” and literary institutions. At the same time, it helps us to deaestheticize literature somewhat and defamiliarize again the violence, pain, and love that it contains.6 [End Page 99]So it is fitting to consider Svetlana’s art in relation to her writing and to her biographies, her crafted fashioning and editing of herself. Far from any sort Gesamtkunstwerk—a concept she detested, these were cocreations, whose contingent coexistence inspired thoughts on difference and a heightened sensitivity to the beauty of cracks, hinges, border lines, and transit zones.Cocreation was a concept she developed and lived for many years; she theorized it at length in her last book, equating it with freedom.7 Among her cocreators were the people around her as well as thinkers, artists, and philosophers with whom she engaged passionately. For her digital art... (shrink)