Showing papers in "Substance in 2010"

Consumed by Nostalgia

Abstract: I “Philosophy is essentially homesickness—the urge to be everywhere at home.”1 This fragment, a “single gesture” of thought toward an object,2 is equally about philosophy and about nostalgia. If philosophy is the loss of self (that very memento of loss), which it was for Novalis, then so is the way home. If our struggles abroad, our self-preservation and selfdiscovery, solidify our self, or multiply it as they did Odysseus’s, then our homecoming is a flight into fluidity or else a shedding of selves. We should arrive vulnerable, not ourselves, as if never having been exposed to the tempest of the elements or confronted with alterity. The self is a journey homeward, the homely return ever beyond the horizon. The transformations to nostalgic experience over the last century, particularly in the wake of two world wars, tell a dramatically different story. As the affective landscape and everyday life of Western culture were being reshaped, nostalgia—that erstwhile fulcrum of philosophy— began to change course, increasingly bound to the flow of capital. With the emergence of consumerism, utopias of newness and dictatorships of speed, nostalgia “as it once was” became a reactionary vice and risked obsolescence. Capitalism, however, saw nostalgia’s potential for profit and, channeling it now into its waters, gave it unprecedented currency. We face questions about a belatedly “new,” late-modern nostalgia, questions we nonetheless still struggle to formulate. With affect bound for world capital, is nostalgia the last intervening station? How was this itinerary conceived? When did we depart? And can we turn back if we have nearly arrived at our destination?

Deleuze, Guattari, and the "Politics of Sorcery"

Abstract: There is an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, anomic. If becoming-animal takes the form of a Temptation, and of monsters aroused in the imagination by the demon, it is because it is accompanied, at its origin as in its undertaking, by a rupture with the central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become established. (A Thousand Plateaus, 247)

Sensing the Image: Roland Barthes and the Affect of the Visual

Abstract: There is a well-worn narrative, perhaps even a “mythology,” according to which Roland Barthes undergoes two distinct phases as a theorist. In the first phase, he is the mythologist-semiologist who crusades against the “pseudo-physis” of culture, unmasking its myths and decoding its signs. In the second phase, he retreats to the immediacy of his moods and passions, more interested in desire than demystification, in pleasure than politics. At first glance, these opposing tendencies play out nowhere more emphatically than in Barthes’s writings on cinematic and photographic images. While his early semiological texts strive to demystify the apparent immediacy of images by showing how they operate as signs, his later writings celebrate precisely those elements of the image that elude signification—the punctum of the photograph, the “obtuse meaning” of the film—dimensions of the image that can be seen but not described, sensed but not linguistically signified. It is perhaps not surprising that Barthes’s later writings have been

The Revolutionary Unconscious: Deleuze and Masoch

Abstract: I ask in every instance, “is it hunger or superabundance that has here become creative?” At first glance, another distinction may seempreferable—it is far more obvious—namely the question of whether the desire to fix, to immortalize, the desire for being prompted creation, or the desire for destruction, for change, for future, for becoming. But both of these kinds of desire are seen to be ambiguous when one considers them more closely [...]. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ¶ 370

Spiritual Politics After Deleuze: Introduction

Abstract: Religious discourse now permeates the theoretical humanities. At least since Jacques Derrida’s insistence upon complex connections between deconstruction and negative theology,1 there has been an onslaught of writing connecting the demise of traditional metaphysics to the apotheosis of modernity, and a general despair over the possibility of any purely “secular” form of critical reason. A new postmodernism in philosophy now seeks to move beyond merely immanent critique, toward the construction of alternative and experimental syntheses of knowledge and belief. Thus figures such as Agamben, Badiou, Caputo, De Vries, Eagleton, Taylor, Vattimo, and Zizek, among others, have put religious concepts at the center of both analysis and methodology in contemporary critical theory.2 Conversely, contemporary theology (especially the so-called radical orthodoxy movement) has found an engagement with theory to be crucial to its own ends in a post-metaphysical era.3 Meanwhile in politics, the perceived failure (exacerbated since 9/11) of secularization and liberal norms to bring genuine progress and peace has made a violent return to the shelter of dogmatic religious certainty an attractive option for those seeking refuge from an increasingly dehumanized globalization guided by a winner-takes-all neoliberalism that unites the world’s peoples only in enslavement to the economically entitled. But the compelling nature of religious conceptions of struggles against state and corporate power do not end or begin with fundamentalist believers. Even an atheist thinker like Alain Badiou has gone so far as to champion Saint Paul’s vehement Christian faith as a model for militant resistance to the present world order.4 Badiou claims that only something like Paul’s insistence that the community of believers are those separated out from every “positive” or constituted cultural identity has the power to model a humanity that can rise above the morass of confused desire upon which capital and state power play. Badiou summarizes the ideology of capitalism in the axiom that “there are only bodies and languages.” To this “democratic materialism,” which relativizes and thus belittles the significance of all events, Badiou insists we must add the exception, “there are also truths.”5 The militant church (or Maoist militant) belongs to no particular culture, “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free” (Galatians 3:28). Badiou’s insistence on a kind of religious interpellation after the

Sublime Comedy: On the Inhuman Rights of Clowns

Abstract: The thought that politics is a comedy might be a thought so untimely that, for the moment, we cannot imagine it. With his usual talent for exposing the complacency of our age, Alain Badiou, a playwright and novelist as well as a philosopher, has remarked that what our times lack most is a taste for genuine comedy. In a chapter of Handbook of Inaesthetics entitled “Theses on Theater,” Badiou writes,

Rhizome of Boehme and Deleuze: Esoteric Precursors of the God of Complexity

Abstract: 1. Deleuze and the Occult Though it has been claimed that Deleuze sought to delink his thought from all religion (Bryden), a close examination of his major writings, as well as his collaborative work with Guattari, shows that he was closely attuned to the subterranean mystical currents that pervade Western religiosity, often running counter to the dogmas of surface theology and not infrequently becoming entangled with sorcery and things un-faithful. Deleuze was steeped in the esoteric and the occult, as a brief perusal of the “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal” plateau in A Thousand Plateaus (henceforth “ATP”) makes obvious (Kerslake Occult Unconscious, Somnabulist; Reggio), and consistently references their French artistic/literary and German Idealist derivations and offshoots (e.g. Novalis, Schelling, Artaud, Klossowski). Nevertheless, he seemingly taunts his readers by burying important (but uncited) nods to the likes of Hermeticist Giordano Bruno and Tarot revivalist Court de Gebelin deep inside Difference and Repetition (henceforth “DR”) and the Logic of Sense (henceforth “LS”). One has to know one’s way around the literature of mathesis universalis, hermeticism, and the 19 th -century European occult revival (see, for example,

Pierre Alferi's "Allofiction": A Poetics of the Controlled Skid

Abstract: The Limits of Autofiction Since the 1980s (a decade fruitful to revisit) the neo-novelistic revolution and experimental écriture textuelle launched by groups like Tel Quel and Change have been exhausted. It is once again possible to tell a story, even to recount oneself, and “outdated notions” of personhood, chronology, mankind, narrative, psychology, history, etc. (Robbe-Grille, 1963) are quietly coming to the fore again. This transformation, which formerly would have been associated with postmodernism, sometimes takes very idiosyncratic forms. The explosion of autofictional literature, a hybrid between autobiographical testimony and novelistic invention launched by Serge Doubrovsky in his book Fils (1977), is proving to be one of the most durable variations of this. For reasons due in part to the amnesia of contemporary culture, this actually hypertraditional form (isn’t the art of the novel precisely that of the mask, the trap, the game of the elusive boundary between lie and truth?) has been able to pass itself off as a novelty, and its success, at least in commercial terms, continues to our day.1 In considering this autofictional approach, it is not enough to exhume its internal limits, notably the victim-like drift denounced by Douglas Wolk in a study of one of the genres where autofictionality (which he calls “semi-autobiography”) has triumphed—the graphic novel:

Believing in this World for the Making of Gods: Ecology of the Virtual and the Actual

Abstract: In my review essay of Hallward’s book I argued that he was correct to bring attention to the neglected spiritual aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy, but that his negative valuation of this spiritual aspect was dependent on a misreading that ascribed a certain inherent moralism to the difference between the virtual and the actual (Hallward’s version of materialism simply reverses this moralism, so that the virtual is bad and the actual is good). Ultimately this misreading arises out of an ecological and political weakness, for it confuses the relationship between the virtual and the actual with a moral relationship, whereas what Deleuze presents is more adequately understood as an ecology of the virtual and the actual within the milieu of immanence.1 The task of this essay is to develop this idea beyond the merely provocative to a demonstration of this aspect, both spiritual and ecological, of Deleuze’s thought. The argument unfolds from the axiom that Deleuze’s philosophy is a spiritual philosophy of a certain sort; I do not seek to defend that position here. To do so would be to repeat some form of an argument that has already been made, from Hallward’s polemic to Philip Goodchild’s positive critical engagement to Christian Kerslake’s very valuable historical studies and philosophical defense of the esoteric in Deleuze. Here I can only provide a truncated axiom of this spiritualism: the spiritual elements

Pierre Alferi and Jakob von Uexküll: Experience and Experiment in Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif

Abstract: This article focuses on Alferi’s second book of poetry, Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif, published in 1992. It is a companion piece to my article, “Pierre Alferi and the Poetics of the Dissolve” which examines his 1997 collection, Sentimentale journee. 1 The notion of the dissolve links two things that are crucial in Alferi: first, the way sense keeps forming and dispersing in his poems through a variety of means mirrored by frequent references to cinema and other technological media: as in cinema, rupture and continuity are both essential to the process. Second, the way his poetic language, working through processes of disruption or interruption, and favoring a thematics of cognitive experiment and bewilderment in everyday contexts, offers an image of subjective experience or identity that stresses the pleasures and pains of self-dissolution. What I call a “poetics of the dissolve” is bound up with the consistently experimental—or fauxexperimental—bias of Alferi’s work, its play with procedures and modes of conjecture associated with different kinds of scientific inquiry. Devising or simulating an experimental situation can be seen as recapping—with a few twists of irony—aspects of the avant-garde tradition, including the project of questioning not only the division between various art forms in favor of a more generalized set of practices, but also the border between art and life, art practice and the everyday. Alferi works in ways that fit with the recent prevalence of an “art of the project,” where the artwork is the residue of an experiment, a setting up of certain conditions, a report. 2 The back cover text of Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif reads as follows:

"Many shades of the departed" Where Kafka Returns to Haunt his Reception

Abstract: It requires only a little leap of the imagination and no extensive academic investment in the textual drama concerned to note parallels between the critical industry dedicated to the study of Kafka’s authorship and the bureaucratic systems at work in The Trial and The Castle. Knowing the critical industry in question, these parallels cannot have escaped notice, but being a serious student of Kafka helps to fully personalize and develop the analogy. Thus Kafka scholarship is situated in a comparable relation to the reader of Kafka’s works as is the Castle bureaucracy to K. Concomitantly there always remains the possibility of an appointment in the industry around Kafka, but it entails, one suspects, menial duties not unlike those of a janitor in a village school. The more seriously the reader seeks to get to the bottom of The Castle, the more he unearths a vast information network endlessly turning his attention to further required reading, delaying and diverting him, as he must increasingly see it, from his original objective; the more seriously the reader takes this business, the more he threatens to be weaned off his erstwhile assumption that he has a unique calling with regard to The Castle. All evidence to the contrary, he very possibly leaps to his own conclusions about The Castle. Yet there is no way around it: to arrive at a conclusion about The Castle is, more or less unwittingly, to settle for a position in the village, for the village is nothing less than the constantly evolving conclusion K. never ceases to arrive at. The village is, in a sense, K.’s work-in-progress. There is, however, another course of action for anyone who intends to stay the course, and this is, like K., to take up no appointment, at least

The Navel of the Dream: Freud, Derrida and Lacan on the Gap where "Something Happens"

Abstract: �� ��� Jacques Lacan, who made a career of placing the Freudian oeuvre in unexpected philosophical contexts, admitted in 1955 that “I’m not the only one to have had the idea of taking up the dream of Irma’s injection again” (Seminar II 147). That dream of Freud’s, the analysis of which constitutes one of the most famous passages of The Interpretation of Dreams, has occupied a central place in the psychoanalytic canon for several reasons: it is the first dream that Freud subjects to a rigorous analysis, and it is his own dream; moreover, its analysis, unusually thorough, leads Freud to two essential formulations (the dream as a fulfillment of a wish, and the logic of the broken kettle). Freud returns to this dream several times throughout The Interpretation, just as post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinkers have consistently returned to Irma to theorize aspects of the dream-work and the unconscious. The body of scholarly work on Irma is so voluminous that, some forty years after Lacan, Joan Copjec could call Irma’s injection “that overinterpreted anxiety dream” (119); two years after that, undaunted by “the enormous analytic literature that, throughout the world, has submitted it to investment and investigation from every angle,” Jacques Derrida would publish his own close reading of the dream in a 1996 essay entitled “Resistances” (“Resistances” 5). The dream has, to borrow a phrase from another context and J. Hillis Miller, “an inexhaustible power to generate commentary” (Miller 177). Derrida, like many others, turns to Irma’s injection as a way to access the thoughts of a discipline’s founding father at the very scene of that discipline’s invention. Rightly skeptical of creation myths, however, Derrida concludes that “Freud was neither able nor willing to inaugurate a new concept of analysis” in this case (“Resistances” 20). “Resistances” is persuasive in its refusal to acknowledge the audacity or inventiveness of Freud’s self-analysis; it is daring in its call for non-psychoanalytic perspectives on Irma. It is arguably the most serious challenge to psychoanalytic orthodoxy anywhere in Derrida’s work, The Post Card included. In this it recalls the bravado of Lacan, who, with characteristic glee in frustrating his auditors’ expectations, spent two meetings of his second seminar

Repetition and Revolution: Primal Historicization in Deleuze, Regnault and Harrington

Abstract: Marx’s theory of historical repetition, as it appears notably in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, turns on the following principle, which does not seem to have been sufficiently understood by historians: historical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condition of historical action itself. Harold Rosenberg illuminates this point in some fine pages: historical actors or agents can create only on condition that they identify themselves with figures from the past. In this sense, history is theatre. (91/123)

Pierre Alferi: A Bountiful Surface of Blues

Abstract: In 1995 Pierre Alferi and another young French poet, Olivier Cadiot, published a new journal entitled Revue de Littérature Générale. The journal was devoted to contemporary French writing, but its focus was mostly poetry. In France at the end of the twentieth century, the practice of poetry was fragmented and characterized by a multitude of mini-groups often fiercely battling each other. To fuel the fire on this battlefield, a myriad of journals existed, each for the sole purpose, it seemed, to advance the views and theoretical dictates of the few members of the groups producing them. With the new millennium, the situation has eased somewhat. Alferi and Cadiot’s new journal was thus a breath of fresh air, in the sense that it was conceived as a forum, a place where many views could be expressed without any pre-determined, partisan agenda. The journal was also extraordinary in that it did not conform to the standard format of slim French poetry journals, but had close to 500 pages. The extraordinary nature of the published beast probably explains why there were only two issues: 1995 and 1996. Nevertheless, it put Alferi’s name in the public domain, and this early publishing enterprise remains emblematic of his status in the jungle world of French contemporary poetry: a rara avis, a strange bird. He is not the favorite son of a powerful publishing house; he is not the heir of any current autocratic “Prince des Poètes;” he is not out there defending a special brand of post-poetry, neo-lyricism, language poetry, or e-poetry, etc. Like the original image of his first major publishing venture, we can consider that he is cultivating poetic eclecticism.

Poems and Monsters: Pierre Alferi's "Cinépoésie"

Abstract: “Tabler sur un cataclysme” In Pierre Alferi’s oeuvre, what place should we give to his “cinepoetical” excursions? As we seek an answer, let’s briefly take the poet at his word, and start where, according to one of his recent titles, everything begins. Ça commence à Séoul (2007) is the result of a collaboration between Pierre Alferi and sculptor Jacques Julien. In this poetic and visual “series of adventures” described on the DVD cover as “woven together from images and sounds, from voice-overs and slow motion, from storyboards and cartoons [“toons”], there emerges an “incident regrettable” (the title of one episode) concerning a banal ping-pong table. The four intertitles that announce the scenes, as in a silent film, tell us that this table, “on four legs,” “feet soldered to the ground,” “incapable of taking part in the merry-go-round,” not having “even the right to undulate or to grow,” and judging that this life “is no longer bearable,” is reduced “in order to regain its liberty / to count on [tabler sur] a cataclysm.”