Showing papers in "Substance in 1978"

One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles

Abstract: It may be that you are forced to be a man from the moment that you write. Maybe writing is a fact of virility. Even if you write as a woman, "femininely." Perhaps what we call feminine writing is only a variation on a genre that is masculine and remains so: the essay. It is said that the femininity of writing depends on content. Writing is feminine, for example, if it operates by seduction rather than conviction. But the opposition of these two efficacies is itself probably masculine. To avoid such alternatives, you claim no assignable difference between feminine and masculine, in writing or elsewhere: but this neutralization of the question is also very suspect (as when someone says that he's not political, neither on the right nor the left; everyone knows he is on the right). It is a philosopher who is speaking here about relations between men and women. He is trying to escape what is masculine in the very posing of such a question. However, his flight and his strategies probably remain masculine. He knows that the socalled question of a masculine/feminine opposition, and probably the opposition itself, will only disappear as he stops philosophizing: for it exists as opposition only by philosophical (and political) method, that is, by the male way of thinking. In the midst of these aporias, one is tempted to give his pen over to the antonym of the inquisitive adult male, to the little girl. But it is said that, like a savage, she doesn't write. And above all, that like savages, she is herself the creation of her so-called opposite, the sober-minded male, who in reality is also her judge: a creation of the jealousy he feels for something he is forbidden to be.

The West and the Truth of Sex

Abstract: At the end of the nineteenth century an unknown Englishman wrote an immense work, a dozen copies of which were printed. It was never put on sale, and it ended in the hands of a few collectors or in rare bookshops. One of the least known books, it is called My Secret Life. The author undertakes a meticulous narrative of a life which was essentially devoted to sexual pleasure. Night after night, day after day, he recounts, without ostentation or rhetoric, the least of his experiences, in the sole hope of expressing what occurrred, how it came about, and with what intensity and quality of sensation. Was this his only concern? Perhaps. For he often speaks of this task of writing the mundane details of his pleasure as a pure obligation. It is as if there were a secret and somewhat enigmatic obligation to which he could not avoid submitting: it is necessary to say everything. And yet there is something else; for this stubborn Englishman it is a question in this "play-work" of correctly combining pleasure, true discourse on pleasure and the pleasure particular to the utterance of this truth; it is a matter of involving the diary-whether he reads it aloud or writes it concurrently-in the course of new sexual experiences, in accordance with the rules of certain strange pleasures in which "reading and writing" play a specific role. Stephen Marcus has devoted some remarkable pages to this obscure contemporary of Queen Victoria. 1 For my part, I am not particularly inclined to treat him as a person of the shadows, situated on some "other side" in an age of prudishness. Is it indeed a discrete and sneering revenge against the prudishness of the epoch? Above all, he seems to me to be situated at the point of convergence of three, scarecely secret, evolutionary lines in our society. The most recent is that which led medicine and psychiatry to a quasi-entomological interest in sexual practices, their variations, and all their disparity; KrafftEbing is in this lineage. 2 The second is older; it is what has inclined erotic literature, since R6tif and Sade, to seek its effects not only in the intensity or the rarity of the scenes which it imagined, but also in the relentless search for a certain truth of pleasure. An erotics of truth, a relationship of the true to the intense is characteristic of the "new libertinage" inaugurated at the end of the 18th century. The third line is the oldest; it runs through the entire Christian West since the Middle Ages. It is the strict obligation for everyone, through

Exact and Human

Abstract: Boston, January 17th, 1950, sky 38% cloudy, cirro cumulus. A depression was announced over the Atlantic; it was moving from West to East toward an anticyclone situated over Russia, and so far showed no signs of avoiding it by swerving to the north. The isotherms and isotheres fulfilled their obligations. Robert Musil publishes in 1931 the first volume of The Man Without Qualities. From the first chapter, remarkably enough, nothing follows. As a consequence that was foreseen therefore, but largely aleatory, the novel remains unfinished. Norbert Wiener, publishes in France in 1947, a work written in English, the famous Cybernetics, which he prefaced himself, and dated or localized in Mexico. From the beginning he announces weather conditions in Boston for January 17th, 1950. Musil measures the temperature relations and describes the cold front for an August day in 1913. It is since the time of the nomads, when it was necessary to remember the location of the pasturing grounds, that the importance of the place where one is has been exaggerated. Robert Musil soon leaves Vienna for Berlin, then Austria for Switzerland, where he dies, in Geneva, in 1942. Where Wiener was at the time, I don't know. Where he was at the time that Hermann was editing his work, who knows. What the importance of Vienna is, in the conjecture, I don't know either, although it is possible and easy to inform oneself on this point. Vienna where pedestrians form nebulous cordons, Vienna as cloud. Clouds of the depression that glides over the Atlantic, clouds that parade by, and that God would count, from the little German song, in the first lines of Cybernetics. Spatio-termporal clouds. Where are they? What are they doing?'What will they soon be doing?

Sources and Resources: The "Pretexts" of Originality in Montaigne's Essais

Abstract: archetypal expression of human knowledge and experience; humanists urged the study and imitation of classical sources as the highest form of activity intellectual and literary. Scholars poured over works of authoritative authors seeking as readers to rediscover and assimilate established truth and learning and as writers to integrate and re-present this corpus and to attain that sublime eloquence which was considered man's supreme cultural achievement.1 While counter-currents in both the XVth and XVIth Centuries weakened

Flushing out "The Voice in the Closet"

Abstract: When Richard Pearce notes that "[Raymond] Federman takes joy in the fact that he cannot separate himself from his fiction, is flushed by the need to go on, to invent, improvise, extend himself into the unknown through language,"' he is accurately describing the surface of Federman's novels and the substance of his surfictional polemics. Yet we must also attend to the considerable edginess in these works, to the uneasy tone that subtends their play, to Federman's suggestion that his game involves serious stakes and that it cannot be won. In Take It or Leave It, Federmanjokes about his past: "[I don't want to insist too much on the Jewish side of this story but one cannot avoid it altogether I just hope you guys don't make too much out of it]"; he denies its reality: "after all let's be honlest a biography of a guy's past experiences it's always something one invents afterwards in fact life is always a kind of fictional discourse a lot of bullshitting!"; but he also speaks of the gamble that motivates his constant digressions and of "the central primal loss (X-X-X-X): / HURTS to lose all the time / Hurts like hell near the heart / near the guts too."2 This primal loss-the death of his family at Auschwitz-is evaded, denied, doubled, and inscribed in his fiction.

The Other Wordly Landscapes of E.A. Poe and Rene Magritte

Abstract: Several critics have found most intriguing Rene Magritte's outspoken admiration for Edgar Allen Poe. 1 Hammacher recounts that the painter, during his only trip to the U.S. absolutely insisted on a visit to the Poe shrine. The most obvious signs of the painter's interest in the writer are the titles of his paintings: "Le Demon de la Perversion", 1928("The Imp of the Perverse") and "Le Domaine d'Arnheim" 1949 and 1963 ("The Domain of Arnheim").2 Neither in "Le Domaine d'Arnheim", nor in "Le Demon de la Perversion" did Magritte take into account such narrative elements as the plot or the person of the narrator. In the latter painting he presents the spectator with two apparently contradictory superimposed forms. The perforated pseudo-relief suggests a mobile but undecipherable cloud; and through its lacunae appear segments of a solid, well-polished geometrically divided mahogany board. Magritte thus refers to the problem raised by the American writer in discussing the "perversion" that lives in each of us.3 Such desire pushes us towards instability when we aspire to safety. Moreover, Magritte's canvas furnishes a possible answer to Poe's question regarding the impossibility of penetrating by an a priori rather than experimental or psychological approach, the motivations of human behavior.

Some Aspects of the Self and the Other in Rousseau and Sade

Abstract: In 1753 Jean Jacques Rousseau published his celebrated Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalitd. Some forty years later, in 1795, the Marquis de Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir appeared.1 Rousseau attempts to reconstruct the history of mankind; Sade outlines a possible structure for a republican society. Both authors focus on the situation of the individual in society and hence raise the perennial question of the distinction and relationship between Self and Other. Rousseau traces the relationship by means of a descriptive text following a hypothetical evolution of society; Sade does so in a prescriptive text which aims at freeing human behavior in a republican society. Both authors explore limits of human experience, Rousseau by a reconstruction of its origin, Sade by a deconstruction of the prevailing modes of behavior. In comparing the two seminal texts, separated in time by the revolution, the present study investigates how they demarcate possible elaborations of the Self/Other relationship. Both authors compare their enterprise to that of ancient philosophers and metaphorically place themselves in the Greek Lyceum. In addition Sade uses the dialogue and proceeds in Plato-like fashion, investigating concepts by questions and answers. Rousseau's discourse is theoretical and general, addressed to humanity as a whole; Sade's teaching, practical and specific, is addressed to the young uninitiated Eugenie. The author of the Philosophie also makes general claims. The pamphlet, "Frangais, encore un effort si vous voulez etre republicains," read in dialog V and constituting almost one-fourth of the entire work, is addressed to the French nation under a republican government. The preface of the work, moreover, greets the libertines of "all ages and all sexes" and dedicates the work to them; it is followed by an ordinance that mothers should prescribe the text to their daughters. Both authors pay tribute to the republican form of government. As mentioned, Sade's pamphlet is addressed to the French republic, and Rousseau, praising the republican model, dedicates his discourse to the republic of Geneva. For both authors republican government represents an adherence to the principles of freedom and

Reflections on the Double Bind of Literature and Psychopathology

Abstract: The interpretation of modern literature remains a difficult task even though several generations of scholars have created a highly differentiated body of criticism.1 Even today, numerous critics agree that modern literature tends to resist scholarly discourse. In the final analysis, these critics claim, the modern work of art is based on paradoxical structures which can be circumscribed in great detail, while remaining essentially untouched. This view encourages a heightened sensitivity toward the autonomy and wisdom of the work. A critic aware of his limits will avoid over-simplification and pseudoscholarly categorization. Yet an emphasis on paradoxical structures invites mystification. A fine line exists between sensitivity to the work and suspension of critical inquiry. Literary criticism might benefit from recent communication theory which gives renewed significance to Whitehead and Russell's analysis of "false" paradoxes.2 According to the theory of logical types, a "false" paradox results from a confusion of semantic levels, most commonly created by a lack of logical distance from an established system. "False" paradoxes occur when the intrinsically irreconcilable elements of a system are viewed as permanently given and beyond question. Staying within a system while trying to explain it easily leads to a mere affirmation of the inexplicable.3 Some such affirmation can be observed in recent literary criticism. There is a trend toward the restoration of the autonomy of the work which recalls the tenets of New Criticism. Along with this trend, a renewed emphasis is placed on the enigmatic qualities of modern literature. Once again this literature is admired for its seemingly inexhaustible multivalence and for its negativity which defies definition. Yet an alternative to this retreat into the work will not exclude the insights of the recent past. There is no simple path away from the narrow but safe confines of a criticism which derives its justification from close adherence to the structures provided by the work itself. Sociological, psychoanalytic and various other methods have been convincingly criticized for their reductionism which translates the language of literature into a preconceived extraliterary terminology as if the work could be dissolved into more

Ideology and Contradiction in La Chartreuse de Parme

Abstract: One problem of Marxist criticism is that, since it rejects the concept of a pure, transcendent aesthetic object, it is often accused of reducing literature to "mere" ideology. Yet, if ideology were seen not as a narrow set of political ideas, nor even as a specific theory grouping together concepts, but as basic forms of perception and codes of action relating a subject to the world, then an ideological analysis could, insofar as this is possible for any critical method, avoid reductionism. It would instead help us to know more extensively and more precisely the workings of literary form. This study will explore the relations of literary form and ideology in Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme. If we look at the ideology of Stendhal's era (France in the first half of the nineteenth century), secondarily at its concepts, and primarily at the operations by which it produces itself and the subject's relation to the world, we can then see those same operations at work in La Chartreuse. Although the elements of ideology weave a complex fabric, one basic element will be concentrated on here as constitutive not only of ideology but also of the magic of Stendhal's novel. This is the process by which an ideology suppresses the possibility of seeing its own outer limits, and of knowing its own conditions of production and existence.

Topographies of Memory

Abstract: If a literary text is by necessity a representation, then all theories of literature, whether they postulate the function of literature to be the mimetic representation of a non-textual reality or, within the broader context of intertextuality, the repetition, displacement, or reinscription of purely 'textual' entities, necessarily associate with each text a 'memory.' The representative function of the text is essentially bound to such a 'memory,' which the text is supposed to imitate, reproduce, or transcribe. Each theory of the text views the relationship of a text to its 'memory' differently, but what remains constant is the postulation of the necessary relationship of a text to a memory. Again, it does not matter whether this 'memory' is taken to be a metatextual 'reality,' a textual world-such as the medieval Book of Nature, or the Borgesian Library, which as the first sentence of The Library indicates is equivalent to the Universe--or a composite amalgamation of other texts, a textual archive. If the function of a text is assumed to be in any way re-presentational, then to every text there correspond one or more particular memories. In fact, it hardly seems relevant any longer to oppose mimetic conceptions of literature, which assign to the text the task of imitating an 'outside reality,' to non-mimetic conceptions,which characterize texts as unable, because of their representational nature, ever to reach anything beyond a textual horizon. If every text begins as repetition or representation-and after Derrida and Said this can be considered a settled point-it necessarily inscribes within itself, in no