Abstract: This essay explores how lyric poetry can produce effects of presence that are not primarily based on interpretation. After considering recent theorizations of the lyric, the article focuses on two defining features of the genre—apostrophe and deixis—that are relatively deficient in meaning but also inflected in space and shows how two sonnets by the early modern Catalan authors Francesc Vicent Garcia (1582–1623) and Francesc Fontanella (1622–1685) convey presence spatially.

Abstract: This article seeks to characterize, describe and analyze Samuel Weber’s reading method. Weber’s attention to details—be they philological, rhetorical, semantic, semiotic, or other—is remarkably specific. Weber’s reading method by no means applies only to literary texts. The category of what Samuel Weber calls the “literary” exceeds by far the mere genre of fiction, or even what most people would be tempted to call “literature.” Weber’s passion for jokes and Witz is emblematic of his engagement with the literary. Jokes are immediately unreadable: they seem to inhibit the faculty of reading. However, jokes endlessly and precisely challenge the so-called faculty of reading. The joke operates like a text whose intelligibility is barred and yet elicits violent effects.

Abstract: To readers of Of Grammatology , to anyone aware of how apartheid was dealt with in the administration of pre-1990 S. Africa, the relation between classification and violence will seem obvious. I want to suggest that though this may be illuminated by a time of European uprisings and warfare—the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, which is hardly surprising, these also provoke profound changes in administrative tools, in particular, the procedures used for classification. I suggest these changes are based on what could be called a concept of the neutral—which at the time was called “the average man.” It was from this that classification could be conducted. I then pick up on an administrative problem—how to raise and number an army by conscription, and in particular how to reckon the probable number of draft dodgers—and talk, briefly, of a statistician, the Belgian Quetelet (1796–1874), who provided a kind of solution. In Quetelet’s reckoning, the problem evinces an intriguing connection to the question of the measurement of human beings—how tall, how broad, etc., and how do the individual measurements relate to the complete set. When thought of as a group of proportions, are these measurements unreliable or stable, do they form a reduced set of possible variations? Can they be relied on for classificatory purposes? The history of the mass measurement of human beings is thus related to the management of armies (cf. the procedures of Frederic I of Prussia, father of the one called “The Great”). I then relate the work of Quetelet to possible violence, in relation to what Freud, after the anthropologist Ernest Crawley (1867–1924), called the “narcissism of small differences.” I shall examine this in relation to demographic method more generally, emphasizing how measurement seems to involve the flattening of difference. In this perspective, Quetelet discovered a set of stabilities in human life which seem highly disquieting— the percentage of suicides for instance within a society—, yet his methods once developed allowed the possibility of, for example, managing Covid.

Abstract: Few religious groups made as distinctive a mark on nineteenth-century French culture as the eighteenth-century convulsionnaires , a fringe group of the dissident reform movement within Catholicism known as Jansenism. The epicenter of their movement was the tomb of deacon François de Pâris, whom adepts viewed as a saint capable of carrying out miraculous cures and divine justice against the repressive Unigenitus Bull. The Convulsionaries both captivated and alarmed their contemporaries through their spectacular faith demonstrations, which sometimes involved crucifixions and other brutal mortifications. They also inspired literary adaptations like Léon Hennique's Elisabeth Couronneau (1879). Although often described as a "hysteria" novel, Elisabeth Couronneau is more properly understood as a historical novel that drew on a long tradition of satires of Parisian life. Hennique's fictionalization of the Convulsionaries and their context illustrates the role which eighteenth-century accounts of this peculiar religious movement played in shaping perceptions of it in the nineteenth century. It also shows the place of literature in the process by which later theorists created an imagined relationship between the Convulsionaries and phenomena they sought to explain—which included not simply hysteria, but also credulity, delusions of grandeur, and the dangerous powers of social imitation.

Abstract: The meanings of passage are so many. Most often, they reflect ways of inscribing ourselves in time and space. And since time and space are in constant flux, adapting to the very idea of passage eventually leads us to a wisdom that accommodates metamorphosis, ephemerality and incompleteness. Passages force us to interact. It is precisely this kind of transversal thinking, which defies the idea of fixity, that we will be reflecting on. Under the aegis of Walter Benjamin, the man of the Parisian passages , we'll begin by asking what happens to the word passage in the passage of languages, more specifically, between French, German and Italian. This philological reflection will then lead us to specifically geocritical considerations, aimed at including the examination of representations of human spaces in a dynamic perspective, a flow, a passage. It should be noted that immobility is more a feature of the political construction of places than of the literary perception of spaces . As it is difficult to sum up in a few formulas the different meanings of passage that populate this research, I will confine myself to three occurrences of the term, all of which imply mobility: transgressivity, multifocalization and interdisciplinarity .

Abstract: The perennial issue of whether Marx's notorious review of Bruno Bauer's early writings on the "Jewish Problem" are themselves antisemitic has always been tied up with the equally fraught issue of Marx's own Jewish "identity." The aim of the present essay is to reframe this debate and to ask whether, by taking Marx's positionality as a perceived Jew as well as that of his various implied readers into account, Marx's provocatively disturbing response to Bauer's antisemitic views might shed new light on the unsatisfactory alternative between a false universalism and an equally dissatisfactory particularism. I argue that it is possible to read the review as modeling two different languages: one that will affect differently positioned readers differently, but that none of them will openly espouse, a universal sensus non-communis ; and a second that reaches toward a sensus communis by means of its provocative use of the name of the Jew.

Abstract: This article reads Gottfried Keller's novel Der grüne Heinrich [ Green Henry ], which exists in two versions (first version from 1854/55; second version from 1879/80) in light of recent theories of decision-making. It relates the life story of the protagonist Heinrich Lee, which is based on Keller's, to the form and structure of the novel. The constellation of decisions he makes are the decisive factor in this relation. While the first version, which Keller himself describes as shapeless, corresponds to the protagonist's misguided decision to become a painter and his equally shapeless paintings, the structured reworking of the second version of the novel reflects Heinrich's pragmatic decision to give up his unsuccessful career as a painter and to accept the position of an official secretary.

Abstract: In part to shed indirect light on the rhetorical dimensions of current socio- and cultural-political polemics, and on current versions of the rationalist-irrationalist polarity, I examine Kant's critique of both rationalism and irrationalism in "What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?" and related texts through the Critique of Judgment . I show that Kant insightfully produces there an undecidability of the nature-culture and the philosophy/rhetoric oppositions, an undecidability that in turn challenges aspects of his own conception of the critical enterprise. I show then how Kant's development of aesthetic judgment as sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment extends his thinking about this undecidability. Considering the limits of Kant's own adherence to the maxim of the sensus communis —"putting oneself in the place of every other"—I proceed to reexamine his racist race-theory, and to argue that this theory helps him avoid confronting the problems raised by his insights into the inseparability of the nonetheless mutually opposed terms, nature-and-culture and philosophy-and-rhetoric. I suggest here that his insistence on this ideological race theory is significantly overdetermined—his investment in it intensified—by the degree to which it papers over problems with his system to which his own thinking has given rise. Finally, I suggest that it would be useful, in the current situation of widespread manipulation and disavowal of rhetorical means within cultural-political polemics, to confront and acknowledge head-on the undecidabilities Kant exposes but then evades, undecidabilities that emerge in his double critique of rationalism and irrationalism.