Showing papers in "Substance in 2003"

Loss: The Politics of Mourning

Abstract: Illustrations Preface Introduction: Mourning Remains David L Eng and David Kazanjian I Bodily Remains Returning the Body without Haunting: Mourning "Nai Phi" and the End of Revolution in Thailand Rosalind C Morris Black Mo'nin' Fred Moten Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Mark Sanders Catastrophic Mourning Marc Nichanian Between Genocide and Catastrophe David Kazanjian and Marc Nichanian Passing Shadows: Melancholic Nationality and Black Critical Publicity in Pauline E Hopkins's Of One Blood Dana Luciano Melancholia and Moralism Douglas Crimp II Spatial Remains The Memory of Hunger David Lloyd Remains to Be Seen: Reading the Works of Dean Sameshima and Khanh Vo Susette Min Mourning Becomes Kitsch: The Aesthetics of Loss in Severo Sarduy's Cobra Vilashini Cooppan Theorizing the Loss of Land: Griqua Land Claims in Southern Africa, 1874--1998 David Johnson Left Melancholy Charity Scribner III Ideal Remains All Things Shining Kaja Silverman A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia David L Eng and Shinhee Han Passing Away: The Unspeakable (Losses) of Postapartheid South Africa Yvette Christianse Ways of Not Seeing: (En)gendered Optics in Benjamin, Baudelaire, and Freud Alys Eve Weinbaum Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: ACT UP's Lesbians Ann Cvetkovich Resisting Left Melancholia Wendy Brown Afterword: After Loss, What Then? Judith Butler Contributors Index

Écrits de linguistique générale

Abstract: Substance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2003 her symbolic inscription, paradoxically, that excess comes to me by virtue of its inadequate inscriptive form. Without a theological dimension, without the neighbor to intervene in mere political or cultural practices, these norms alone can result in nothing but the tragic struggles of hegemony that mark our world today. Stuart J. Murray University of California, Berkeley

Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity

Abstract: Charles Baudelaire, possibly the most influential author of nineteenth-century France, created a poetics of modernity and a thematics of the city; he transcended genre by moving between poetry and prose. He is also the most accessible of modern French poets to an American readership. These essays examine Baudelaire's poetics and the complex relationship between the poet and his twentieth-century literary heirs, including Rene Char, Yves Bonnefoy, and Michel Deguy. The contributors, who include Deguy and Bonnefoy, are all distinguished writers or critics noted for their own poetry or for their scholarship on Baudelaire and in French studies. Their essays go to the heart of what makes Baudelaire so important: his modernity and his influence from the very beginning on other poets, including those outside of France. The essays are written in English, with citations from Baudelaire and other sources in both French and English.

What the Nazis Saw: Les Mouches in Occupied Paris

Abstract: Recently much debate has turned around Jean-Paul Sartre’s alleged duplicity during the Occupation: did he or did he not knowingly replace, in 1941 at the Lycee Condorcet, a Jewish professor who had been deprived of his post simply because he was Jewish? Did this make Sartre a knowing, albeit passive, accomplice to Vichy racial policy—an accomplice, like millions of others in wartime France, in that he was, with an apparently clean conscience, willing to take advantage of another’s—a Jew’s—misfortune? 1 At this late date, it seems difficult to adjudicate this issue and proclaim Sartre’s bad faith. We can never know for certain what he knew, and when he knew it. To try to understand Sartre’s problematic position under the Occupation, I think one must go to the actual writings we have at our disposal: his essays, plays, and interviews. Failing this, we will always be constrained to judge him based on innuendo, negatively: what he wasn’t doing, but should have done; what he may have known, and yet did not act upon. I think if we turn to his writings, or at least one of them, we will be confronted with a different problem. The question of Sartre’s shadow-collaboration turns not around what he knew, or what we can know about his knowledge, but around what we can and cannot know about what wartime audiences knew and did not (could not) know of the supposed message of Sartre’s wartime drama. Was Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Les Mouches, published in April 1943 and first performed that June in Occupied Paris with the approval of the German censor, a Resistance play? Was it meant to convey a pro-Resistance message? The debate has swirled for a number of years, giving rise to accusatory books, such as Gilbert Joseph’s Une si douce occupation, arguing that Sartre never was a Resistance figure, and that the works he published under the Occupation were harmless, and hardly noted for their insurrectional fervor. On the other hand, defenders— starting with Sartre himself after the war—have argued that key wartime works such as Les Mouches were really calls to resistance; given censorship, however, it was necessary to mask the message with, for example, the setting of ancient Greece. 2 Sartre even argued that the drubbing administered by collaborationist critics was proof that they understood the play’s true intent: an argument for human freedom, in opposition to the Vichy doctrine of remorse and eternal

The Anti-Colonial Archive: France and Africa's Unfinished Business

Abstract: A few years ago, Ania Loomba explored a number of critical approaches to the vigorously debated relationship between the local and the global in her book Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998). Since then, her work on the interface between colonial and postcolonial discourses has become a new reference point in what remains an ongoing exchange on this local/global question in postcolonial theory.' Loomba, in her conclusion to the chapter "Challenging Colonialism," points to what she considers a sensible suggestion by Peter Hulme to move away from grand narratives "not on epistemological grounds, but rather [because] the grand narrative of decolonisation has, for the moment, been adequately told and widely accepted. Smaller narratives are now needed, with attention paid to local topography, so that maps can become fuller" (252). Loomba affirms Hulme's call for renewed focus on smaller narratives and local topographies, but leaves open questions about what postcolonialism's grand narrative may exclude. I would like to bring some pressure to bear on Hulme's position and its underlying assumptions, not because I favor grand narratives over local topographies, but because the nature of the relationship between the local and the global strikes me as more dynamic than his statement admits. I propose that if critics broaden the scope of their analysis to include smaller, local narratives, postcolonial theory's grand narrativeinsofar as one does indeed existwill be significantly altered, if not radically challenged. Rather than new knowledge of local contexts serving to flesh out a widely accepted narrative of decolonization, I argue that thick descriptions of the former African French colonies--of the kind a specialized area studies approach affordsactually upset and contest the grand narrative of decolonization as currently told by postcolonial theorists. First, let us briefly look at two of these "grand narratives of decolonization," which seem, for the moment, to be in competition with one another. On the one hand, there is the Western capitalist view based on what Frederick Cooper identifies as "Europe's self-perceived movement toward state-building, capitalist development, and modernity." This vision posits a form of historical progress against which African, Asian and Latin American history appears as a "failure" (157). This story is told very often on the pages of the New York Times, for example. 146 I Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2003 SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003

Come rain or shine

Abstract: Moi: OK, here's one I should probably drop, since it's quite beyond me: how should we take into account whatever biological basis there is for human behavior? Evolution didn't make us so many blank slates for culture to write on. But when "nature" gets brought into matters that are social and cultural as well, the result is usually a mess, often a crude justification for not changing things that might well be changed. So the question is: how to acknowledge constraints without turning them into shackles?

Joan of Arc in America

Abstract: Joan of Arc as cultural phenomenon is surprisingly present during this millennial era. The fascination with Joan's story reveals, I believe, a nostalgia for certainty in what is frequently (and loosely) called the postmodern era. There is something about Joan of Arc that appeals to the present obsession with blurred boundaries, and thus with the collapse of "clear" categories (of subjectivity, gender, power, the historical Church, and so on). At the same time, however, Joan's story tantalizes us today because of its unexplained passion and conviction. It seems to presuppose an unacknowledged apodictic which, for secular writers of contemporary theory, both confounds and attracts us. In this essay, I would like to contextualize aspects of Joan as instances of what might be called the "vestigial" traces of the issues she complicates. Metaphor and historical context are here to be understood as symbiotic. On October 13th 1996, the Associated Press ran the following article:

The Dream Narratives of Debris

Abstract: Consider the so-called decorator crab. As it moves across the sea floor, it covers itself with debris, such as bits of algae and sponge, which it attaches to the small hooked hairs that cover its carapace. Most critical essays proceed in a similar manner. Bristling with snipped-off quotations, footnotes and bibliographical references, they adopt a protective coloration that allows them to pass unharmed through intellectual deep waters. Nor is this only superficial decoration: the body of the essay is often assembled from wideranging sources, which in their conjunction may form an idea quite different from any one of its components. The present essay is no exception to this rule. It assembles itself out of bits and pieces of Freud, Piaget, Levi-Strauss and Baudrillard; and its examples are drawn from artists in various media: Joseph Cornell, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Gorey and Donald Barthelme. That debris (no disrespect is intended) is assembled here precisely in order to make a point about the ways that debris is assembled – the ways that, in the first instance, material residues give rise to certain narrative arrangements, which are never so thoroughly assembled that they escape from under the sign of debris. They have now been translated into mental debris, and as a consequence partake in the kinds of associative processes that also give rise to dreams. Narratologists have expended much effort in the attempt to lay out narrative’s syntax. But the structuring principles of narrative may be more akin to those of the decorator crab than to those of the grammarian. Within the drowned world of debris, narrative and dream clasp hands. Joseph Cornell supplies our first example of such an encounter. On April 15, 1946, he took time out from constructing his boxes of assembled objects to clean up his workspace. That night Cornell wrote in his diary: “Had satisfactory feeling about clearing up debris on cellar floor—‘sweepings’ represent all the rich crosscurrents ramifications etc that go into the boxes but which are not apparent (I feel at least) in the final result” (Cornell 128). While it is common enough for an artist to feel that the completed work has fallen short of the vision, it is less common for an artist to locate that vision in the work’s material leftovers—in sweepings, debris, the residues of the

Passages Beyond the Resistance: Char's Seuls demeurent and its Harmonics in Semprun and Foucault

Abstract: Spanish-born writer Jorge Semprun, in his memoir of deportation to Buchenwald, L'criture ou la vie (1994), tells how in spring 1945 he first came to read what is arguably Rend Char's first influential book of poetry, Seuls demeurent, and to recite on the liberated camp's assembly ground one of the keynote poems of the collection, "La libertd," as an emblem of his survival. Although Char had published several collections prior to World War II, Seuls demeurent was a major sign that something had changed in his poetry and politics, that he was about to entrer dans la carriere, to borrow the phrase that historian Olivier Wieviorka uses to describe the political and cultural ascension of French resisters in the postwar era.1 A Gaullist officer, Marc, present at the liberation of Buchenwald in midApril 1945, gave a copy of Seuls demeurent to Semprun, who had been deported for resistance activities in France. Semprun immediately felt that this book transcended what better-known writers had published from the late 1930s through early 1944, when he lost contact with a French literary scene he knew well (L'Ucriture, 79-87). Indeed, Seuls demeurent resonated so strongly in the post-Liberation years that it furnished a major reference point in Foucault's preface to his Folie et diraison (1961), where the philosopher links his own critique of social repression with Char's "Partage formel," the poetic sequence of aphorisms that concludes Seuls demeurent. Without mentioning his source (either poet or title of the poem), Foucault quotes from aphorism XXII, where Char praises the uncanny murmur he calls "dtranget6 lgitime,"2 and where we might hear the whispers of the Resister's legitimate revolt against repression as well as a legitimate strangeness or new self-assertive idiom within poetry.

Celine: The Success of the Monstre Sacre in Postwar France

Abstract: In his excellent study of the way in which Louis-Ferdinand Celine is portrayed in French school textbooks, Alain Cresciucci refers to the author's "classicisation remarquable" (220), by which, and in spite of "une contre riception pugnace," Ctline moved from the near-oblivion of the Pariah in the 1950s and 1960s to canonical status by the end of the twentieth century, becoming a "mod6le de l'auteur devenu classique" (221). In fact, the case of Cline is highly instructive, not least because of the extremes between which his reputation lurches, providing valuable insight into the process and effectiveness of the Epuration following the Liberation, and into the workings of literary history itself. Most accounts of Celine's life depict his career as a classic tale of riches to rags, by which a highly talented writer throws away his literary reputation through inexplicable and unjustifiable political decisions that lead him to exile and imprisonment and to long-term critical and popular neglect. It is certainly true that the major events in Celine's life after 1932 would appear to support such an interpretation. The success of Voyage au bout de la nuit propelled the hitherto unknown Celine to the forefront of the French literary stage and, in spite of his constant complaints to his publisher, Denoel, made him a wealthy man, able to indulge his taste for travel, staying in Europe's finest hotels and crossing the Atlantic by luxury liner. This lionization, astutely stage-managed by Denoil, included the prestigious annual Zola address in Medan in 1934, and lasted up until the end of 1936, when Celine, apparently emulating the hero of his medical doctoral thesis, Semmelweis, wilfully sabotaged the Left-wing foundations of his literary support, first through his denunciation of Soviet Marxism in Mea culpa, and, more seriously, through the anti-Semitic pamphlets, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), L'Ecole des cadavres (1938), and Les Beaux draps, published at the height of the Occupation in 1941. The writer's widow, Lucette Destouches, has always maintained (most recently in her conversations with V6ronique Robert), that C1line's aim in publishing his anti-Semitic writing was purely pacifistic:

Of Books, Bombs, and Backward Thinking: Jean Dutourd's Reactionary Literary History

Abstract: Against the backdrop of the Cold War and its bitter politicization of Parisian artistic circles, author and columnist Jean Dutourd complained in 1973 that rival acolytes no longer settled their quarrels through mocking battles of wit: "Jadis, on disait que le ridicule tuait... Aujourd'hui, ce sont les cocktails molotovs lances par des sauvages hirsutes, fanatiques et analphabetes" (CE 20). He was to receive unwarranted evidence of this trend a few years later (though apparently the extremists were literate after all). On November 13, 1977, a small incendiary device was ignited in front of his building, causing minor damage to a local business. Unfortunately, during the July holidays of 1978, events took a much more serious turn. Dutourd returned to Paris to discover that his apartment had been blown up. This second attack consisted of a 54-lb. bomb detonated just outside his door. The blast propelled the elevator cage through the wall and across his bedroom, leaving little more than rubble in its wake. While no arrests were ever made, a group calling itself the "Section franco-arabe du refus" (SFAR) claimed responsibility for the attack. The nature of their dubious "accusations" against Dutourd suggest a proPalestinian group (or individual): "Nous avons detruit le repere [sic] du provocateur Jean Dutourd, homme de plume au service de la presse juive. Ce premier avertissement aux intellectuels devrait faire reflichir tous les nationalistes revanchards" (Le Monde, 16-17 July 1978, p. 14). On September 1, 1978, the group issued another statement after a similar explosion destroyed the residence of a prominent French television news anchor: "Notre coup de semonce n'a pas 4t6 entendu. Yves Mourousi a paye pour ses attaches et pour l'obstination du fasciste Jean Dutourd" (Le Monde, 1 Sept 1978, p. 7). Despite the SFAR's garbled and inflammatory characterization of Dutourd, he has declined to delve into specifics of the case. He has offered only the same evasive, pat explanation: "Parce qu'on n'aime pas mon style, on me met une bombe."' This sidestep from the political to the aesthetic

The Politics of French Literary History in the US and France Today

Abstract: The study of French Literature in American universities has undergone tremendous changes over the past two decades, as everyone involved in its teaching is aware. These changes are in part attributable to "internal" pressures, such as the impact of new theoretical paradigms and critical approaches (cultural studies, post-colonial studies, gender studies, queer theory, to name the major ones). But they are also the result of practical, "external" considerations, including declining enrollments in many foreign languages, and other curricular pressures linked to "globalization." Most important, they reflect historical and cultural developments of extraordinary magnitude: the increased visibility of post-colonial cultures and societies; the end of the Cold War with its Manichean dichotomy of "East" and "West," ongoing efforts to achieve gender equality, and other, emerging issues. As a result of these and other changes, national literatures and the political, social and cultural forces that shape them have experienced seismic shifts, to the point that in many instances they can no longer be labeled "national," in the traditional sense. New authors and cultural artifacts are studied; "canonical figures" are relegated to the "dustbin of history" or, conversely, enjoy a comeback for reasons that may have little to do with their initial notoriety; forgotten or marginal writers achieve prominence because their writings are newly relevant; and figures not even "literary" assume central roles because their works or actions are considered crucial to the illumination of significant moments in the past or places in the present. Under these conditions, the writing of literary history as well as the politics that shape it need to be reconsidered, as many literary historians and critics have recognized. Among the "progressives" or modernes, the changes described above require nothing less than a radical reconceptualization of literary history, on a global scale. Deterministic or "evolutionary" logics must be rejected, national boundaries need to be erased and even exploded, and the cultural, linguistic,

Paul Morand: The Paradoxes of "Revision"

Abstract: For those who ponder the revisionism that took place among French intellectuals and writers in the 1950s regarding the split between Right and Left, Paul Morand's oeuvre offers a fruitful subject of study. This could seem illogical, for we are talking about a writer who does not consider himself an intellectual, and refused any revision on his own account when he was fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September 1944, based on his choices and actions as a highlyplaced bureaucrat during World War II. The logical challenge (to speak about revisionism from the standpoint of an unrepentant radical) is also a challenge to logic, since Morand's positions -more complex than suggested at first glance, and thus richer-seem linked to paradox. The Dictionnaire Robert defines paradox as "Opinion qui va h l'encontre de l'opinion communement admise." In fact, as a recalcitrant Vichyist, Paul Morand places himself against the current of the dominant historical doxa, and sometimes even against the Vichyist minority in which he enclosed himself. The dictionary adds; "Etre, chose, fait qui heurt le bon sens." We see Morand in this second meaning, which clarifies itself in a third one on the level of logic: "se dit d'une proposition qui est a la fois vraie et fausse." The paradox creates a closed circuit, a link between opposites. The reader is sent back to terms like antinomy, contradiction, sophistry. I will not attempt here to explore the vast domain of political involvement or non-involvement and interpretations thereof. I will also attempt not to follow in the footsteps of readers who have already made great headway in decoding Morand's texts, such as Jeffrey Mehlman. I will take care not to go down the roads of polemic or rehabilitation. My goal is not to take sides, but to detect a coherence in Morand's writing, from post-war novelist to aging diarist. In fact, his Journal inutile (1968-1976) provides a generic and chronologic counterpoint to the earlier writings, allowing one to measure how much Morand substitutes the division Vichy/Other for the Right/Left cleavage. It will gradually become apparent that the writer never stopped rehashing and recomposing directly, via the journal, or implicitly via his fictionthe era 1940-44. He did not revise this past, but looked at it again and revisited it, in order to demonstrate three points: 1) revision characterizes man and the world; 0 Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2003 SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003 43

The Post-Exotic Connection: Passage to Utopia

Abstract: Antoine Volodine has been called utopian,' but in what sense? His flights of fancy cannot be categorized among outmoded revolutionary notions, nor among any of the "new" contemporary utopias: technological (democracy via the web, Esperanto on the Internet), scientific (equality via cloning, perfection via the genome) recreational (vacation villages, urban entertainment centers, raves), artistic (total art, art transformed into life), or others. In Volodine's work, utopia is inscribed in a discursive space that is complex and paradoxical. Established by the (utopian?) non-opposition of opposites, it juxtaposes a radical political credo and an absolute nihilism that rejects all faith in any imaginable political or religious solution.2 This utopia without hope annihilates all possibility of an ideal world, and projects the principle of futureless revolution into an imaginary and remote geography. This is the itinerary in Volodine's most explicitly utopian journey, Le Nom des singes, which opens with the failure of the revolution and closes on the "intermittent" vision of the slum that the survivors, Golpiez and Gutierrez, sought to flee in order to establish an egalitarian commune "over there." The circular return to the point of departure reveals the journey's failure, but the "intermittent" vision makes the utopian space appear within the very circle of that failure: henceforth, the slum is situated "in the distance, beyond the territory of the spiders" who "in certain inaccessible areas of the forest [...] establish utopias that are more revolutionary and even more successful than those of the rest of us" (136). Although the expedition closes in defeat and agony, one has a glimpse of the paradoxical reality of utopia, fundamentallyforeign3 and necessarily elsewhere. This reality has a name-"post-exotic literature"--whose alterity goes beyond the political anchorage that founds it. If the West now renounces the revolutionary principles underwritten by egalitarian and communitarian imperatives, these are inscribed as pure loss in the inaccessible and closed space of the fiction, where the community of sub-humans is established. ? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2003 95 SubStance #f 101, Vol. 32, no. 2, 2003

"Une voiture peut en cacher une autre": Twentieth-Century Women Writers Read George Sand

Abstract: The francophile writer Edith Wharton spent no small amount of time motoring around France in the early twentieth century. As the equally francophile writer Julian Barnes informs us, Wharton also had a habit of naming her cars after French writers. One summer when Wharton had been reading a biography of George Sand, she had not one, but two cars: "we had a large showy car which always started off brilliantly and then broke down at the first hill, and this we christened 'Alfred de Musset,' while the small but indefatigable motor which subsequently replaced 'Alfred' was naturally named 'George."'" As is often the case in literary history, the "large" and "showy" seems at first "brilliant" and gets all the attention, but, as the road

The Past is Now

Abstract: (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, Composition no. 1, Hopscotch). Some of them offer scandalous stories (Story of the Eye, Story of 0); others retain the power to shock, long after they have been appropriated and enshrined in the canon (Against Nature, Ubu Roi, Naked Lunch). As much as it pains me to admit it, some perfect books are maddeningly-and without a doubt intentionally-obscure (The Making of Americans, Tomb for Five Hundred Thousand Soldiers). Others persuade us that conspiracies are afoot, and preferably phony ones (Foucault's Pendulum, Dump This Book While You Still Can!, Fourbi). Perfect books must be perfectly reflexive (The Counterfeiters, Doctor Faustus, Ficciones, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books). Perfect books should offer us perfect moments. For me (if perhaps not for the Anny of Nausea) the most perfect expression of the perfect moment is when Perceval gazes, transfixed, at the three drops of blood in the snow. Why aren't there more moments like that in the books I read? Perfect books should assure us that too much is never enough (Under the Volcano, The Ginger Man, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Dark Night of the Soul). Perfect books should tell us that it's OK to say no (Bartleby the Scrivener), and they should persuade us that there's nothing wrong in spending a day, a week, a month or longer flat out on our couch (Oblomov, The Bathroom). Finally, some perfect books must be perfectly obsessional, perfectly tailored for perfectly obsessed readers (The Confessions of Zeno). Should the existence of such a breed one day be confirmed, that is. As a reader (and I am first and foremost, in my present incarnation, a reader), I have always looked for books that combine each and every one of those qualities in perfectly resonant harmony. And some day soon, I fervently hope to come upon just such a book. Or perhaps-mirabile dictu!-a whole shelf of such books. Is that truly too much to ask? University of Colorado

The Le Pen moment

Abstract: On July 14, 2002, a 25-year-old neo-Nazi named Maxime Brunerie drove a rented car from suburban Courcouronnes to Paris for the Bastille Day parade along the Champs Elysees. He carried a guitar case containing a .22 rifle he had recently purchased. The day before, on the British neo-Nazi website Combat 18 (18 signifying AH, the first and eighth letters of the alphabet, the initials of Adolph Hitler), Brunerie had posted a message: "Watch television on Sunday, I'll be the star." At the parade site, Brunerie blended in with the crowd. As President Jacques Chirac's vehicle approached, Brunerie extracted the rifle from the guitar case and took aim. According to most accounts, he managed to get off one shot before the person in front of him, a 56-year-old Alsatian nurse named Jacques Weber, grabbed the barrel and wrested the gun from him. The wouldbe assassin was then wrestled to the ground by, among others, a French Canadian of Algerian descent, Mohamet Chelali. The following day, Chirac phoned Weber and Chelali to thank them. Interviewed in Le Monde, both men expressed no desire to be considered heroes. As Weber put it, "Nothing could be more normal than to act like that under the circumstances." But to recover from the emotional shock of the

Embodied Consciousness and the Poetic Sense of the World

Abstract: "We must," writes Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception, "recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon" (6). With this declaration, he begins his attempt to overcome a philosophical habit of opposing self and world, of perpetuating dualisms in which the ultimate foundation of "truth" invariably resides in whichever term of the duality a given thinker deems more fundamental than the other. Behind this restless foundationalism is a particular desire that sets it in play-the desire for an initial set of principles which, however few and narrow in scope, can at the very least be taken as certain. To this desire for certainty Merleau-Ponty will oppose the fact of ambiguity, since "ambiguity is of the essence of human existence,"' since "existence is indeterminate in itself, by reason of its fundamental structure" (169). This structure is that of consciousness itself, or more precisely, that of embodied consciousness, since for Merleau-Ponty consciousness, in its original, pre-reflective capacity, "is being-toward-thething through the intermediary of the body" (138-39). And while this somatic intentionality depends on a certain "transcendence" (169), without which consciousness would neverfind itself within a given situation, we must resist the temptation to conceive of this transcendence as in any way "transcendent"-i.e., as an elevation of the subject to a vantage point above, beyond, or prior to the relation between body and world, or as the "transcendental" activity of a cogito that founds this relation and to which embodiment appears as an afterthought or, worse still, an impediment. What embodiment calls for is an understanding of the subject not as constitutive of, but as constituted along with experience-a move of particular importance not only in aesthetics (in its broadest sense), but also in cognitive science, as

Direct flights and stop-overs

Abstract: I. Transatlantic Exchanges As we have seen,' French theory is literally on the move-it is still being exported, transported, and transmuted. We've heard various versions of how, and why, French theory is inevitably misunderstood, just as American theory gets jumbled and scrambled up during its own trip across the Atlantic. Much of what "passes" and does not "pass" as French cultural theory (some "travels" well while other parts do not) can be described by a number of spatializing metaphors that turn toward what at first glance might seem a purely spatial phenomenon -"how x passes fromf to a" or "how y passes from a tof." But it is actually a temporal-spatial movement that can be seen and understood in terms of "transit." In other words, what I'm interested in exploring here comprises a certain "chronotopics" of passage, a chronotopics that looks not only at the contexts of production and consumption of French thinking in America (understood as the larger "Americas"), or American thinking in France, but also, at the time and spaces of the passages used to go from one context to another-the transport or transit that must necessarily occur in time and in space in order for x to get to a from for for y to get tof from a. I wish first to read this chronotopics of passage in part with the aid of Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk, an excellent model for turning space into sight and sight into space, before turning both space and sight into visible time.

Post-Exoticism, or Internal Literatures

Abstract: When I asked Antoine Volodine for a possible title of a future conference on his work, he replied, “Writing a Foreign Literature in French.” This apparent paradox proposed by the novelist suggests that his work is similar to a literature from elsewhere—exotic—and therefore somewhat incomprehensible to his readers, like a foreign text that has been translated but stripped of any information on all the references that point back to its culture of origin. However, not all of Volodine’s texts could be called “foreign.” In fact, Volodine’s oeuvre can be divided into two parts. First of all, it describes a world of detention camps, a terrifying prison world where hundreds of inmates live. And despite the fact that we can’t immediately situate this world, it is perfectly understandable. It harks back to a kind of archetype of the prison camp world, under the thumb of a totalitarian power—a universe and powers that have marked the twentieth century. But Volodine’s oeuvre also recounts something else—or, at least, gives expression to, opens out onto other oeuvres arising from the very heart of this prison-camp world— works whose authors are prisoners, inmates. And it is this literature, this novelistic production of the camps, which seems exotic and even more— which presents itself as literally schizophrenic, autistic, closed in on itself and refusing any contact with what is not itself, with the outside world beyond the camps. Admittedly, there would be a lot to say about this outside world. However, the main thing is that it is an intra-novelistic “outside,” corresponding to the outside world ruled by an obscure totalitarianism that is responsible for the existence of the camps. But this “outside” is also very probably extra-novelistic; it is constituted by the world of Volodine’s readers themselves. In a metaphorical or analogical way, the schism between inside and outside proclaimed by the post-exotic novelists can easily appear as the expression of an awareness, ever-clearer and more painful, of the schism between, on the one hand, the writer immured in a stubbornness to speak outside of all worlds, outside of all conventions, in his own language, and, on the other hand, a world that no longer pays attention to literature, a world distracted by the interminable chatter of the media, a world that turns

Let's Take that From the Beginning Again..

Abstract: Antoine Volodine: In my early novels, I was referring exclusively to police situations. The exchange took place in prisons, in cellars, in torture chambers. Nevertheless, the form of the responses always had a relationship to literature: under the guise of a response, the interrogated person recounted stories, or, more accurately, imagined them. Sometimes, too, as in Rituel du mepris, he wrote them down, on whatever was available-straw, mildewed paper-in the darkness of a cage. Quickly, though, starting with Lisbonne, derniere marge, the interrogation was carried out on two fronts: that of information and that of literature. For example, in Vue sur l'ossuaire, the truth that the inquisitors seek with such brutality is inexplicably included in a collection of poetic prose. This slim volume becomes the focus of all the questions. Despite their obsession with piercing its secret, the interrogators do not see the evidence: there is no great mystery; the book seals an amorous alliance that is beyond the reach of the ugliness of politics and war. It's true that the frequency of interrogations in my books has been reinforced since I have been invited by researchers and journalists to speak about my texts, to avow my intentions, and to justify myself concerning the literary means that I use. At the risk of appearing disagreeable, I affirm that only my texts contain the answers to the questions you'd like to ask me. The interview is an exercise that I go along with because I am obliged to, but I don't sincerely believe that it is part of the communication between my readers and myself, or, rather, between the voices of my narrators and the friendship of my readers.

Language, Violence, and History

Abstract: Notes 1. Address of the President of the Czech Republic, His Excellency Vaclav Havel, on the occasion of the Liberty Medal Ceremony, Philadelphia, July 4, l994. 2. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. Trans James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, l959, p. 100. See also Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, l961. 3. See “The Anxiety of Change, The Anxiety of Change: Reconfiguring Family Relations in Beaumarchais’ Trilogy” Modern Language Quarterly 55:1 (Spring, l994), 47-79; “Words of Change: August 12, l789.” In The French Revolution 1789-1989, edited by Sandy Petrey, 33-47. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, l989; “Operateurs du changement: de Miss Polly Baker a Murphy Brown.” Ed. Nicole Boursier. Oeuvres et critiques XIX, 1 (l994), 7078; “Changing the Stakes: Pornography, Privacy, and the Perils of Democracy,” Yale French Studies 100 (2001), 88-119; “Changing the Stakes,” conference on Reading Ethics, State University of New York at Buffalo, March 29-30. 4. “Civilizational Imprisonments: How to Misunderstand Everybody in the World,” The New Republic (June 10, 2002), pp. 28-33.

I. Bryce-Hell II. Fontenelle, Troubadour of Knowledge

Abstract: SubStance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2003 direct access to understanding. I have only to open a book to roam effortlessly in the world designed for me by Proust and others like him. The other route takes me through a frustrating labyrinth, with unending new vistas such as fascinate the reader in the library of Babel. Indeed, the first way is through a book, the second through a library of libraries. I still have to decide whether there is any connection between Book and books, and vice-versa. But, while I was dreaming my way through so many questions and texts, thinking the thread was hopelessly lost, I came to realize that, even though my quest had produced no result of the sort I wanted, something had happened: Time had passed and, in the end, I was not quite the same as I thought I was at the beginning (once again, having read Proust, I should have known). True, for the most part my efforts had been in vain, but not totally: I have become a different man, both a little wiser and with a better overall knowledge of a very small slice of the past. I know that the Unknown keeps growing faster than the grasp I try to gain on it, but the pleasure I find in assembling ever-smaller bits and pieces of what’s left of the 19th century is getting stronger every day. I used to be a “specialist”; I am now an “amateur,” that is, someone who accepts with bittersweet relief the fact that to most questions he can confidently reply: “I don’t know.” Université de Montréal

The Clarity of Secrets

Abstract: "He upsets a harmony without our knowing how he succeeds in doing it: perhaps because, used to the horror of Earth, we only see the alien horror he attempts to impose on Earth" (Jorian Murgrave, 95). Thus ponders Dojna, one of the two female soldiers sent to seek out Jorian Murgrave, the being (is he human?) who wants to destroy Earth. Thus perhaps thinks the reader, confronting the universe of Volodinian fictions, who shudders as he reads, and then, closing the book, looks peacefully on his daily horror-at least more comfortable than the desolate steppes or the ravaged cities where the characters wander. Also more reassuring than these paradoxical spaces where one advances without advancing, where the monastery promising refuge constantly eludes the advance of the two deserters, where the underground passages ineluctably lead to the same shop of the lute-player of the shadows. More reassuring than these no man's lands where dead people wander among several uncertain endings. Than these mental Moebius strips, where the linkage between dream and reality is imperceptibly made, where one can die in a dream, even if one awakens immediately in order to dodge the fire from flame-throwers, and where one investigates one's own death, at the risk of seeing oneself condemned to ashes: "Go away...you are dead..."

Interrogation: A Post-Exotic Device

Abstract: Reading an interrogation, and to a greater extent analyzing it, puts one in a complex and ambiguous position. At any moment the researcher experiences the interrogation and thus may be ensnared by fiction, projected into the examiner's position, forcing the meaning of the text, often involuntarily. By choosing this form as an essential element of his poetics, Volodine foregrounds the participatory dimension of reading and analysis, a game of the tenuous distance one strives to maintain with a text. One must then avoid a double pitfall: either to assume the interrogator's role and risk doing violence to the text, or to accompany the interrogated party unconditionally, trapped by this complex device. Far from being a mere dramatic ploy that exposes the narrative fabric, the pervasiveness of interrogations in Volodine's work leaves little room for doubt. Beyond the "interrogator novels" (Rituel du mepris, Le Nom des singes, Le Port interieur), this form governs one of the diptychs in Vue sur l'ossuaire, a part of the eleventh lesson in Post-exotisme en dix lepons, leqon onze, and appears under multiple guises in all his other works. Interrogation is clearly an effective device that definitively binds aesthetics to politics. It associates language and power, the act of speaking with the seizing of power. Fiction is born as a resistance to the interrogator's exacting demands for meaning. A conflict then arises in which two conceptions of language confront each other. Furthermore, interrogation offers a reflection on writing put to the question, on a literature under constraint, from which fiction attempts to distance itself. It portrays duality as a source for both alterity and separation. On the other hand, the language of fiction constructs the possibility of a community, thereby achieving the egalitarianism to which the texts lay claim. Thus the dimension of conflict in this writing style can be conceived as a product of this essential device.

Minor Angels: Toward an Aesthetics of Conflict

Abstract: If, some time in the future, a literary critic or a cultural anthropologist were to conduct a survey of literature from its beginnings up until the end of the twentieth century, that scholar would realize that representations of violence and conflict feature prominently across periods, traditions and genres. She or he would then come to the realization that it is the war narrative, from Greek epics to historiographic metafictions, that has most significantly contributed to the popularization of violence in literature. If this critic were to pursue his or her inquiries further, and attempted to catalogue works that address the related issues of conflictual violence and war, he or she would have to include, among many: Agrippa d'Aubign6 (Les tragiques), Rabelais (Pantagruel, Gargantua), Voltaire (Candide), Victor Hugo (Les orientales, La ldgende des sikcles), Gustave Flaubert (Salammbo), Maupassant (Boule de suif), Zola (La debacle), Malraux (Les conquierants), Sartre (Les mains sales), Patrick Modiano (La place de l'Ptoile), and Jean Rouaud (Les champs d'honneur). In an addendum to this prestigious list, our critic would then list a somewhat less-known writer who went by the pen-name of Antoine Volodine. Having added Volodine's name to the footnotes of his or her magnum opus, and sent the final manuscript to the publisher, our critic would think no more of it, and go on to pursue other lofty academic projects. A few days later, a commando of anonymous radicals would seize the manuscript, drown the unsuspecting editor in his own blood, and finally set our unsuspecting critic on fire with the pages of his or her book. At this point, you will have guessed that, for Antoine Volodine, literature "is" a serious business, and that, like Prometheus, one always gets burned when one plays with fire. Antoine Volodine does not write about the war-related calamities that