Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination

Reviewed by: The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh Scarlett Baron (bio) The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh, by Michael O'Sullivan. New York: Continuum Press, 2008. 184 pp. $120.00. In 2008, Sarah Tribout-Joseph published Proust and Joyce in Dialogue.1 The title of Michael O'Sullivan's second book, The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh, which came off the press in the same year, might seem to adumbrate an exploration of broadly similar literary terrain. But such is not the case: O'Sullivan's study constitutes a markedly different kind of endeavor. This is clear from even the briefest of glances at these two works' respective opening gambits. While Tribout-Joseph's inquiries begin with an account of James Joyce's and Marcel Proust's much mythologized meeting in Paris in 1922, O'Sullivan's first sentence hones in on the theological and philosophical concerns at the heart of his investigation. "The Incarnation story," he declares, "is a compelling one" (1), before launching into a dense exposition of some of the links between various exegeses of the Biblical narrative and twentieth-century phenomenology. O'Sullivan's study comprises four chapters: "Phenomenology and Incarnation," "Joyce and the Incarnation of Language," "Proust and the Incarnation of Language," and "Incarnation and Impotence: Joyce, Proust and Desire." The book is in some ways a continuation of musings presented in O'Sullivan's first book, Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism and Belief (chapter 1 incorporates sections from this earlier monograph).2 It is apparent from the titles of O'Sullivan's texts, with their predilection for the enumeration of abstract nouns, that his studies are ambitious in their breadth and subject-matter and that they are forthrightly theoretical in their critical proclivities. Even among the scholarly literary-critical community, theoretically inclined works have a reputation for difficulty verging on impenetrability, and this study is not one to assuage the doubts of skeptics. Every page is packed with highly conceptual jargon. Working definitions of terms and phrases drawn from specialized corners of theology, phenomenology, and literary criticism are not provided.3 As a result, the book's semantic fabric is a slippery, often inscrutable, surface, and O'Sullivan's meaning can, at times, be bafflingly elusive. This state of affairs is not helped by the fact that his own voice is systematically muted by frequent references to, and quotations from, a wide array [End Page 161] of pronouncements by other thinkers. Names and inverted commas swarm the text, filling every interstice in which an original argument might unfold. Michel Henry, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, Paul Ricoeur, Hent de Vries, Julia Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière: these are just some of the names whose authority is invoked in the introduction alone. O'Sullivan's study takes religious images in Joyce's and Proust's works as points of departure for his consideration of a vast range of abstruse philosophical musings on the connections between word and flesh, rightly claiming that "Joyce and Proust share a devotional attention to the artistic process that draws them to the concepts of incarnation and transubstantiation as motifs for artistic endeavour" (5). He examines ways in which the oeuvres of these two canonical modernists may be said to perform phenomenological incarnations of their own. Such a project speaks to some of the longstanding interests of Joycean scholarship, which has long been fascinated by the author's use of epiphany, incarnation, and transubstantiation as images for artistic practice. But precisely because interest in such themes runs high, readers from this particular section of the audience risk disappointment since any real examination of the details and implications of Joyce's treatment of such matters is substantially occluded by the mode of the broad-ranging overview that is adopted here. O'Sullivan's book offers frustratingly little in the way of close reading, and Joyce's and Proust's works, when mentioned at all, are surveyed as though from a great distance and through many mediating lenses. Because O'Sullivan spends little time...

Reviewed by: Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf Jeremy Tambling Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty. By Peggy Kamuf. New York: Fordham University Press. 2018. 161 pp. $25. ISBN 978–0–8232–8229–6. Peggy Kamuf translated the first of two volumes of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, published posthumously, called The Death Penalty; these transcripts appeared in English from Chicago University Press in 2014 and 2015. She says nothing about her work of translation, but her book offers footnotes, as it were, to Derrida’s work, which itself gives a fascinating range of arguments against the death penalty, drawing many examples from French literature: thus Hugo and Camus appear in both Derrida and Kamuf, and Kamuf analyses Baudelaire through the récit given in Le Spleen de Paris, translated here as ‘A Heroic Death’. Kafka appears here; while there are chapters on Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’, an account of an execution he was responsible for in colonial Burma (Myanmar), and on two American texts: Robert Coover’s A Public Burning (1977), his treatment of the electrocution of the Rosenbergs in 1953, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979). The American emphasis reflects Kamuf’s desire to concentrate on America’s history: apparently ending capital punishment in the early 1970s, only to reintroduce it, Gary Gilmore being the first to die under the new permission to kill in 1977. Gilmore (Mailer’s subject), shot for a double murder, brings out an irony Kamuf explores: Gilmore wanted to be executed and refused to appeal against his sentence; lawyers tried to save him because of the precedent that would give for capital [End Page 108] punishment to resume in America. And where much of the rest of the world has abolished the death penalty, America, Kamuf says with further irony, ‘is struggling to survive in a largely hostile world’ given the protection of secrecy, everything to do with execution even being exempted by law from the Freedom of Information Act (pp. 65–66). The interest in discussing the death penalty through literature comes from Derrida claiming that literature, not philosophy, has advanced the cause of abolition, and that literature always speaks against it: ‘literature’, as Derrida considers it, is distinct from ‘belles-lettres and poetry’ (Kamuf’s quotation, p. 19); it is modern, post-French Revolution, metatextual, almost halfway towards theory; Kamuf quotes Derrida saying that it ‘has the right to say anything’ (p. 23)—that being almost a definition of modern literature, as with Blanchot, another writer discussed. (This modernism cannot really claim Orwell, but interestingly, Kamuf has good things to say about him.) Such a literature is essential for a democracy and can only live in one; its power is to question the death penalty, which is read as a particular aim to define the limits of life, terminating its openness to chance. Kamuf makes good points about literature as a witness to capital punishment—a witness being essential to say that an ‘execution’ (a word whose etymology she traces) has taken place. The chapter on Coover shows how modern executions demand secrecy, and how they relate to the obscene. The death penalty is ‘driven by the urge to indecent exposure, which has to call up the contrary drive to keep hidden what should not be exposed’ (p. 82): in this novel, the Rosenbergs are made to die publicly, as a way of bringing home what that shamefulness involves; Kamuf here invokes Freud’s idea of the passage à l’acte, an acting out of unconscious desires (p. 85)—disavowed desires projected in front of spectators who can see what they have repressed. The book is full of sharply suggestive points, mostly unusual in debates of this sort, affirming literature’s inherent value in contesting the absoluteness of the death penalty, cutting off life and language together. Jeremy Tambling SWPS Warsaw Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History under the Mandate

This study aims to analyze how identity politics and power relations related to sexual violence in a religious campus environment. The research approach used was qualitative with a phenomenological method that can analyze the problem of sexual violence by analyzing the theory of hegemony and power relations. The informants for this study were campus officials, namely the Chancellor and his staff, the sexual violence task force and active university students with data collection techniques through observation, documentation, in-depth interviews, and literature studies, then analyzed descriptively and using source triangulation techniques. This study's results showed that identity politics and power relations influence sexual violence in the campus environment. This study concludes that the problem of sexual violence by perpetrators and victims in the campus environment can happen to anyone based on identity politics. This research implies that the higher education environment should be aware of social issues, especially sexual violence caused by identity politics and power relations.

If writing is a form of body (1), which of course is, how does the writing form its own body and style of its existence giving a symbolic a new dimension of political? This question first came my mind when I began think about modernist avant-garde writings in general and L+A+N+G+U+A+G+E writing and Conceptual writing in particular relating my own current ongoing research on body, political, and identity. I was wondering how the recent day writings like language poetry and conceptual poetry furnish an example my point that certain community form their own body and identity by their own self-affectivity, without being overpowered by the dominant ideology and meaning. In my own ongoing research, I am trying invent a new model of political identity moving away from the usual view of the political as a set of power relations between the binaries of ideology, class, gender, race, etc., always constructed by the instantiation of power on the level of state or government or other larger institutions. (2) My point is that there can be a new formation of our political identity going beyond the traditional way of attributing it power relations such as ideology, discourse, and knowledge formations. My interest is explore the possibility of developing a new model of identity beyond and sometimes within these boundaries of power relations, based (unlike the grand narratives of ideology, discourse, class, etc., which are often personalized or individualized) on prepersonal and preindividual affects, which shape our political; and this, I argue, occurs not on top of political formations such as states and governments but at the level of practices of individuals, or groups of individuals. To testify my claim, I bring two communities--one from Eastern culture (the sadhu community (3)) and the other from Western culture (the homosexual community)--into my discussion as case studies. For example, the sadhus construct their own bodies and thoughts (here, the formation of one's body and thought means the formation of political identity or being political), not borrowing from existing ideology, discourse and knowledge as found in mainstream politics, but developing their own body practices through the arrangement of prepersonal or preindividual forces (affects) (4). Similarly, the community of homosexuals creates their identity (their invention of new erotic zones in the body and new discourses of sexuality--i. e. political identity) and becomes political differently from mainstream political codification. This short editorial is an attempt observe how language writing and conceptual writing form their own modes of expression and their own identities as distinct poetic traditions as opposed to, what Charles Bernstein calls, official verse culture. I want show how the avant-garde communities of poets in their different group variations fit into my political categories of sadhus and homosexuals who form their own bodies and identities beyond the prevalent practices and thoughts, and how their writings (symbolic acts) are political. Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian and other poets led a new movement in poetry in the 80s known as L+A+N+G+U+A+G+E poetry. Similarly, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bok, Robert Fitterman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Craig Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff started introduce Conceptualism in poetry after 90s. The main objection of both groups of poets and critics the mainstream tradition was poetry is not a made thing but a making, or process. In other words, poetry is not a message a poet wants transmit but a medium--medium is a message--in which he expresses his concept. The poetry movement was intended to change the way the reader interacts or responds the poem. (5) The language and conceptualist poets believe that the materiality of the language and its objectivist/conceptualist presentation in poetry with the great care is what makes poetry proper. …

Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture

Reviewed by: The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama by Philip Lorenz Matthew Scully Philip Lorenz. The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama. NY: Fordham U P, 2013. 288pages. Philip Lorenz’s The Tears of Sovereignty offers a comparative framework of sovereignty by focusing on this concept as represented on the English and Spanish stages in the works of William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. Throughout his consideration, Lorenz amalgamates and deploys various theories of sovereignty, including those by Francisco Suárez, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, in an effort to more fully grasp this elusive concept. The Tears of Sovereignty is an impressive study not only for its comprehensive range and lucid arguments but also for the structure of those arguments. Sovereignty poses a number of theoretical and methodological problems, for, as Lorenz notes, the concept “is nothing” in itself, yet at the same time, “works” and “continues to work itself out through its tropes” (200, 239, 162). Lorenz’s five chapters between the introduction and concluding “After-Image” proceed to consider five manifestations of these tropes: “Each chapter pursues the staging of a different sovereignty ‘event,’ from the concept’s collapse (‘tears’), through its reanimation (‘transplant’), resistance, transformation (cifras y estampas), and return (‘wrinkles’)” (25). As Lorenz argues, “Sovereignty is troped, or it is not at all,” and in his study he aims to follow its tropic movements (25). Lorenz’s opening chapter, “Breakdown: Analogy and Ontotheology in Richard II,” begins on what is perhaps the most familiar ground. Lorenz inaugurates his approach by engaging Ernst Kantorowicz’s foundational study of sovereignty, The King’s Two Bodies, and its example par excellence of Richard II. Rather than repeat Kantorowicz, however, Lorenz prefaces his reading of Richard II with a lengthy theoretical frame centered on the relation between analogy and ontology, especially in the context of medieval philosophy, in which analogy was understood “as a structure for conceiving of being itself” (36). Typical theorists of sovereignty and analogy emerge in this chapter, but Lorenz returns to Francisco Suárez’s work, a return that recurs throughout the study in what becomes one of the most compelling and productive engagements of Lorenz’s project. Suárez, prefiguring modern theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, “attempts to read sovereignty from its ontological base […] up. Analogy is one of the most important of these grounding structures” (41). Lorenz reads Richard II as a staging of the fall and reinterpretation of sovereignty by considering the play’s staging of the fall of analogy (41–58). By the play’s close, “Sovereignty […] is no longer located in one place or one body. Rather, it is dispersed – in mediation itself” (57). In other words, sovereignty ceases to be understood according to a vertical logic of analogy in which the king’s body draws its power and justification from its link with God. Instead, sovereignty is understood as radiating along horizontal lines, which in Lorenz’s reading implies that this concept gains its power “from an immanent source within creatures themselves” rather than a transcendental or divine source (58). [End Page 1238] As suggested by the following chapter, “Reanimation: The Logic of Transfer in Measure for Measure,” Lorenz’s arguments throughout the book are substantially interrelated. Measure for Measure provides Lorenz an example by which to see sovereignty’s logic of transfer, or “transplant,” in place of analogy. Without the transcendental, vertical organization of analogy, power emerges in Measure for Measure through metaphoric transfer, or substitution, of a body for the “absent sovereign” of the play (67). For Lorenz, the problem of Measure for Measure is one of embodiment, the lack of a sovereign body: “The body is always sovereignty’s pre-condition” (84). Sovereignty “desires to have the body that it is not” and realizes a sense of embodiment through the movement of metaphoric substitution of a body in place of its lack (90). In chapter three, “Resistance: Waiting for Power in Fuenteovejuna,” Lorenz offers a reading of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna and its representation of collective resistance to sovereign power that challenges the “transplant” solution elaborated by Measure for...

El presente artículo es una reflexión filosófica sobre las fronteras entre el Hombre y el Animal a la luz de la obra de tres filósofos contemporáneos: Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida y Gilles Deleuze. En primer lugar, trataremos de definir el “humanismo metafísico” y sus dispositivos de producción de lo humano, especialmente en torno a aquello que Agamben denomina “Máquina Antropológica”, artilugio que definiremos como un “juego de espejos”. A continuación, trataremos de presentar dos posibles vías de escape de esta maquinaria y del antropocentrismo que comporta. La primera correrá a cargo de algunas propuestas de Jacques Derrida, en torno a la deconstrucción del sujeto humanista y de la relación con la alteridad animal. La segunda nos conducirá a la noción “devenir-animal” de Deleuze y Guattari. Ambas ideas nos permitirán subvertir la metafísica antropocéntrica que ha legitimado buena parte de la violencia contra la alteridad.

This article investigates the designed transformation of South African political identity and its constitutional framework as a core aspect of the democratization of South Africa. It compares the racist and exclusive identity of the apartheid state with a redesigned identity of an inclusive and open ‘Rainbow Nation’, a concept coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and spearheaded by Nelson R. Mandela along with the African National Congress. The study considers changes in the legal framework of identity politics, from the Republic of South Africa Constitution Act of 1983 (and the previous apartheid republican Constitution of 1961) through the interim democratic Constitution of 1993 to the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa of 1996. It discusses the possible significance of the 18 amendments to the act regarding South Africans’ social and political identities, and establishes a complex and detailed portrayal of the republic’s legal framework of identity politics. The study combines legal, political, and cultural analysis of the role of law in formatting social and political identities, using survey results to test its impact on society. In conclusion, the paper considers the effects of post-apartheid identity transformation in South Africa.

In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopo litical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content and, especially in the latter’s case, style. He takes as a prominent example the revolutionary transformation from princely menagerie to public zoological garden, as well as Carl Hagenbeck’s subsequent “revolution” in zoo design, which inaugurate, he suggests, not a new biopolitical apparatus of power/ knowledge, but only a different form of the same fundamental structure of sovereign power over the objectified beast. The stakes of Derrida’s ar gument are as significant as its history is burdened. It returns to elements of the longstanding polemic between Foucault and Derrida over madness and history, complicated here by Derrida’s reproach of Agamben’s own, more recent cruel admiration of Foucault. It engages with the question of historical thresholds, regarding both the development of biopower and the history of the menagerie. If we read the Eleventh Session on zoological gardens together with the Twelfth on biopolitical thresholds, their implications for contemporary thinking about human-animal relations become clearer. I will suggest, contra Derrida, that the modern history of zoological gardens does indeed cross important thresholds of biopolitical novelty. While he is no doubt right to insist on the persistence of a human sovereignty that reigns over beasts, his argumentation obscures the emergence, specificity and significance of biopolitical care. Being able to understand and critique contemporary relations of power between humans and animals requires genealogical attention to the particularity of this dispositif. Derrida’s lectures on the beast and the sovereign are erudite and provocative, if incessantly recursive. As he explains in the summary provided for the Ecole’s yearbook, his aim was:

Journal Article Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression Get access Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression . Calvin P. Horn Lectures in Western History and Culture Series. By Wrobel David M. . ( Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press , 2013 . xv + 312 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 .) Jon T. Coleman Jon T. Coleman University of Notre Dame Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 2, Summer 2015, Pages 226–227, https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.46.2.0226a Published: 01 May 2015

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, by Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: A Christian Modernist?, ed. by Jamie Callison, Paul S. Fiddes, Anna Johnson, and Erik Tonning

Os registros orais, desprovidos de grande elaboração retórica, marcam os relatos familiares e os depoimentos sobre episódios marcantes e particularidades aparentemente menores dos grandes conflitos, como a Segunda Guerra Mundial. A memória oral cumpriu uma importante função de transmissão da história, especialmente ao legar para o registro escrito a sistematização dos testemunhos, revelando memórias pessoais na forma de cartas, diários e narrativas, além de se incorporar a várias obras de ficção. Neste trabalho apresentamos o valor de testemunhos de ex-partigiani reunidos no volume Io sono l’ultimo (Eu sou o último) como evocação e transmissão de lembranças pessoais extremamente ligadas ao conflito e como manifestações no âmbito literário. A valorização de uma tradição de comunicação das lembranças pelos descendentes e pelos compatriotas torna o testemunho de homens e mulheres que lutaram pela libertação de muitas localidades italianas muito mais que relato fragmentado quando os leitores interessados na memória dos que sobreviveram, integrada à micro-história dos acontecimentos, percebem a sua lógica expressiva. Exploramos tanto o sentido de testemunha adotado por Giorgio Agamben, quanto o valor estético da voz traumatizada na perspectiva de Márcio Seligmann-Silva.

In this paper, I want to begin to contemplate the possibility that the concept of culture could one day be thought outside modern Western thought, via a reading of Martin Heidegger's 'Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer'. As we shall see, for Heidegger, the dominant position here is representationalism. And so a large part of what I want to do here is to begin to shake the concept of culture from these dominant representationalist moorings.

This essay applies the concept homo sacer, as put forth by Giorgio Agamben, to the social perception of translators and interpreters when they intervene in situations of violent conflict. Examples are drawn from history, from contemporary events (including the investigation of Guantánamo ‘linguists’), from nonfictional writing (such as Daoud Hari’s The Translator), and from fiction (for example, Mia Couto’s Last Flight of the Flamingo). Real and fictional ‘case studies’ agree on the parlous status of the translator. The homo sacer is a literal out-law, that is, someone who is neither punished nor protected by the law. The concept owes much to that of the pharmakos as analyzed by Jacques Derrida, and both philosophers (Agamben and Derrida) claim to be reviving concepts from the classical world, among them the necessity of logos to the polis as posited by Aristotle. The article argues that by the nature of their profession, translators and interpreters in situations of conflict do not belong fully to any of the languages they are translating into and out of; to the non-bilinguals who hired them they seem to be speaking with a forked tongue and in cipher, abandoning logos in favour of mere phoné (voice) and hence moving outside the law of the polis.