Showing papers in "Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences in 2012"

Affect in the End Times: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant

Abstract: Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, is renowned for her work on collective affect, sentimentality, fantasies of citizenship, and feminist and queer theory. In honor of her new book, Cruel Optimism, I asked her to help us make sense of a number of artifacts from the contemporary archive, all of which attempt to mark, in some way, the end of an era—historical, political, theoretical, or otherwise. What follows is a conversation that foregrounds not only the affective dimensions of the contemporary moment but also the circumscription of forms of togetherness by what she calls the “austere imaginary” of the American political sphere. Finally, it probes the question of what role affect theory might play in the re-imagination of social and political life.

Skin, Flesh, and the Affective Wrinkles of Civil Rights Photography

Abstract: If we needed confi rmation of our ongoing investment in the civil rights movement and the visual media that brought its local confrontations to a national audience, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, a summer 2010 exhibit at the International Center for Photography, provides a vivid example.1 Drawing its title from Mamie Till’s heroic insistence on an open coffi n for her brutally murdered son and from the determination of African American photographers and newspaper editors to make the shocking image of Emmett Till’s face visible to the public, the exhibit and its accompanying volume powerfully affi rm the role of the visual media in bringing racial violence into public view. Simultaneously and less explicitly, however, the volume also illustrates how much more vexed this role is than the language that affi rms it, for the horrifi c photograph to which the title refers does not—indeed could not—accompany the title on the cover. Instead, the image is discreetly positioned at the volume’s interior.2 Replacing Till’s photograph on the cover is a more uplifting image by the same photographer. Ernest C. Withers’s depiction of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike shows a long horizontal line of male demonstrators proudly carrying signs declaring “I AM A MAN.” Celebrating and extending the strikers’ visibility,

Unctuous: Resentment in David Copperfield

Abstract: Near the end of David Copperfi eld, when David has become almost as successful an author as the one who wrote this novel, his aunt Betsey says to him: “I never thought, when I used to read books, what work it was to write them!” David replies: “It’s work enough to read them, sometimes.”1 Betsey misses her cue here, but Mr. Omer, the merry undertaker, has earlier paid David the compliment for which his humble “sometimes” fi shes:

Hate as a Passion of Being

Abstract: “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” distills Freud’s theory of the genealogy of hate. Here hate does not appear merely as one possible destination of the drives. On the contrary, when, like Plato in his recounting of Aristophanes’ myth of Eros, Freud undertakes to account for the “origins” of the subject through a sort of genesis myth, he assigns hate a fundamental role. The fi rst phase of Freud’s myth—like that of Plato’s myth of the androgyne, which Freud himself will recall explicitly in Beyond the Pleasure Principle—is one of indifference, in which the subject is a closed One, indifferent to the external world. (It is not by chance that images of cells, shells, and autotrophism, or selfnourishment, recur so frequently in Freud’s work, pointing to the originarily autistic condition of the subject.)1 This phase is characterized by a sort of substantial solipsism, one that seems to exclude a priori every trace of the Other. The subject thus fi rst emerges as a closed One for whom, in this fi rst phase, the object has no exterior-

Considering the Desire to Mark Our Buried Nuclear Waste: Into Eternity and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

Abstract: I am now in this place where you should never come. We call it Onkalo. Onkalo means “hiding place.” In my time it is still unfi nished, though work began in the twentieth century, when I was just a child. Work would be completed in the twenty-second century, long after my death. Onkalo must last 100,000 years. Nothing built by man has even lasted even a tenth of that time span. But we consider ourselves a very potent civilization. If we succeed, Onkalo will most likely be the longest-lasting remains of our civilization. Michael Madsen, director and narrator of Into Eternity

Setting the Stage, Staging the Voice: On Directing Weill and Brecht's Der Jasager

Abstract: The present essay is a refl ection on our recent production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Der Jasager (1930; The yes sayer). It raises various questions of interpretation concerning the opera and attempts to articulate how the direction and staging of the opera addressed these questions. Directed by Michal Grover-Friedlander in cooperation with the stage design of Eli Friedlander, this production was originally performed as the culmination of a year-long course at Tel Aviv University in 2010 devoted to Der Jasager. The following year the opera group Ta Opera Zuta was formed. The group is committed to the integration of research and performance in opera and music theater, concentrating on the specifi c questions raised by the staging of the voice. This integrative vision was realized in Ta Opera Zuta’s 2011 performance of the opera, which can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube at http://youtu.be/l2bIXCoFQUg. Thanks to European American Music Distributors for permission to reprint excerpts from the score of Der Jasager.

"Opera Is a Closed Book": A Conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum

Abstract: The following pages present fragments of a written correspondence between Qui Parle and the poet, thinker, and artist Wayne Koestenbaum that took place in the fi rst few months of 2012. The transcript published here has no claim to phonographic or documentary verisimilitude: the questions and answers are not necessarily presented in the right order, and they have been variously worked over so that the reader ought not to presume that the words necessarily correspond to the bodies or editorial bodies to which they are attributed. We hope that you enjoy this partial, improvisational, and provisory palimpsest (or fantasy) of an “interview.”