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Showing papers in "Substance in 2014"



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the radical break that separates human identity from its others, and what are the implications if we fail to find an inaugural signature that authorizes this extraordinary status, and argue that the reasoning that motors all of western metaphysics rests on the belief that human identity is isolated and irreconcilably alienated.
Abstract: Given the advantage of hindsight, it seems fair to say that Jacques Derrida retained an enduring interest in the question of human exceptionalism throughout his career. Since he was a thinker of origins, we should not be surprised by his forensic attention to what is particular about human genesis—those capacities whose unique achievement and comparative complexity are purportedly without precedent. Our analytical interest in this meditation will focus on the radical break that separates human identity from its others. Does it actually exist, and what are the implications if we fail to find an inaugural signature that authorizes this extraordinary status? Derrida will argue that the reasoning that motors all of western metaphysics rests on the belief that human identity is isolated and irreconcilably alienated. It then makes sense to explain human exceptionalism as a special case of perversion, a unique status which is essentially unnatural. The scene of human arrival, cut adrift “with an ax” (Of Grammatology 121) from its surrounding history and environment, is routinely explained in terms of error, corruption, mistake. I have written elsewhere of Jean Hyppolite’s attempt to indemnify the human as a special case in the face of Derrida’s insistence that nature writes—a suggestion that calls into question the acquisition of language as a unique capacity in human self-definition ( Quantum Anthropologies 16-20). Here we might think of language as patternments of discernment that are biological, environmental, even geological, wherein nature’s metamorphoses manifest the play of legibility, the materialization of systems in potential. Importantly, although Hyppolite is persuaded by Derrida’s argument and concedes nature’s literacy, he balks at the accompanying suggestion that nature could possess agency, intention, or by implication, even forethought. This sense of an organizing center or subjectivity is normally assumed when we refer to reading and writing, and for this reason Hyppolite is understandably puzzled. It seems that nature may write randomly, as if by chance, or even programmatically, for both possibilities could involve a sort of technological facility which, despite complex outcomes, would

10 citations



Journal ArticleDOI

9 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the final session of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics.
Abstract: In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopo litical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content and, especially in the latter’s case, style. He takes as a prominent example the revolutionary transformation from princely menagerie to public zoological garden, as well as Carl Hagenbeck’s subsequent “revolution” in zoo design, which inaugurate, he suggests, not a new biopolitical apparatus of power/ knowledge, but only a different form of the same fundamental structure of sovereign power over the objectified beast. The stakes of Derrida’s ar gument are as significant as its history is burdened. It returns to elements of the longstanding polemic between Foucault and Derrida over madness and history, complicated here by Derrida’s reproach of Agamben’s own, more recent cruel admiration of Foucault. It engages with the question of historical thresholds, regarding both the development of biopower and the history of the menagerie. If we read the Eleventh Session on zoological gardens together with the Twelfth on biopolitical thresholds, their implications for contemporary thinking about human-animal relations become clearer. I will suggest, contra Derrida, that the modern history of zoological gardens does indeed cross important thresholds of biopolitical novelty. While he is no doubt right to insist on the persistence of a human sovereignty that reigns over beasts, his argumentation obscures the emergence, specificity and significance of biopolitical care. Being able to understand and critique contemporary relations of power between humans and animals requires genealogical attention to the particularity of this dispositif. Derrida’s lectures on the beast and the sovereign are erudite and provocative, if incessantly recursive. As he explains in the summary provided for the Ecole’s yearbook, his aim was:

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Charlie Michael1
TL;DR: For instance, the main publicity poster for the Intouchables movie as discussed by the authors features two men sideby-side, grinning ear-to-ear, for French cinema initiates, and the contrast should be striking.
Abstract: ����� ��� T he main publicity poster for Olivier Nakache’s and Eric Toledano’s recent film Intouchables (The Intouchables [2011]) features two men sideby-side, grinning ear-to-ear. The image is oddly difficult to interpret. For French cinema initiates, the contrast should be striking. Seated to the left is Francois Cluzet, long one of the France’s more versatile leading actors; huddled over him on the right is Omar Sy, a French-born comedian of Senegalese and Mauritanian descent who, prior to playing this role, was largely unknown to the French public. Those unfamiliar with the actors will note, at the very least, their different attire; Cluzet’s patterned ascot and Sy’s green hooded sweatshirt signal clear class distinctions to go with their contrasting skin tones. Yet although this type of odd couple is common in French farce (as in Hollywood buddy comedies), the film’s strangely inscrutable title gives pause. Lacking an article in French, intouchables becomes a floating plural adjective and invites speculation. Just who or what is “untouchable” here anyway, and in what sense? Is this perhaps an oblique reference to the lowest rung of the Indian caste system? If so, to what end? In the absence of any other straightforward indicators, the viewer can hardly be blamed for grasping for possible meanings What is clear by now is that this puzzling title is already an historic

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the last decade, French film professionals of North African descent have adopted a broader range of modes of production and genres and now assume a greater variety of roles on both sides of the camera as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Over the past twenty years, in France, as elsewhere in Europe, cinema has produced an increasing number of films that engage with the thematics of immigration (both legal and illegal) and represent the living and working conditions of first-generation immigrants. In France, such films have also tended to focus on questions of citizenship and nationality as they pertain to the French-born descendants of immigrants, whose presence within the nation demands a reconsideration of previously fixed notions of community, origins and national identity. Though certainly not limited to the perspective of one ethnic minority, the majority of these French films, from militant immigrant cinema in the 1970s, to so-called beur and banlieue cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, have nonetheless tended to focus on protagonists, politics and narratives of immigrants from France’s former colonies in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Maghrebi characters are still quite visible on the screen. However, since 2000, French film professionals of North African descent have nonetheless begun adopting a broader range of modes of production and genres and now assume a greater variety of roles on both sides of the camera. Moreover, the last ten years have seen an increasing range of ethnically diverse immigrant protagonists appearing in French-language films, and not solely those from France’s long-established postcolonial diasporas. In many respects, this cinematic shift is representative of the broader social, economic and cultural transformation that has taken place in the way that immigration has been understood in relation to neoliberal globalization and to its belief in the inevitable primacy of market forces, whereby “the once ‘de-bedded’ economy now claims to ‘im-bed’ everything, including political power” (Mentan 215). This has occurred not only in France, but also across Europe. One area in which the consequences of such market fundamentalism have had a direct impact is on attitudes and policies pertaining to immigration of non-European nationals to the European Union. Here, the desire to exploit an ever cheaper, poorly pro

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors distinguish between epistemic approaches that focus on the firm ground of the Archimedean point, offering certitude a la Descartes, and approaches more oriented, like Archimedes himself, toward assemblages where "knower,” point, and lever are mutually implied.
Abstract: Archimedes of Syracuse has long provided a touchstone for considering how we make and acquire knowledge. Since the early Roman chroniclers of Archimedes’ life, and especially intensively since Descartes, scholars have described, sought, or derided the Archimedean point, defining and redefining its epistemic role. “Knowledge,” at least within modernity, is rhetorically tied to the figure of the Archimedean point, a place somewhere outside a regular and constrained world of experience. If this figure still leads to useful ways of thinking about knowing, we are left with the question of how different modes of making knowledge approach their “Archimedean” points. The question is especially important today as a renewed ontological enthusiasm sweeps through humanities disciplines that have grown wary, perhaps rightly, of epistemological skepticism. I distinguish here between epistemic approaches that focus on the firm ground of the Archimedean point, offering certitude a la Descartes, and approaches more oriented, like Archimedes himself, toward assemblages where “knower,” point, and lever are mutually implied. These approaches, elaborated in more detail below, comprise two opposing epistemic styles: a lever-oriented approach tends to foster an uncertainty with positive ethico-political implications and a point-oriented approach tends to foreclose it. Starting from the (contingent) assumption that our figuring is rhetorical all the way down, I describe these contrasting approaches as epistemic styles in order to highlight that who we are is at stake in how we think we know—even when we claim to sidestep epistemology altogether—and that in the entanglement of who we are and how we know, we owe much to all our others. Toward a New Rhetorical Humanism It is, at any rate, not the case that all styles of knowledge-making involve searches for an outside view of things or for firmness and cer tainty, to take two common ways of thinking about Archimedean points. Since antiquity, rhetorical theorists have regarded knowledge-making as the collection and examination of contingent points and effective levers,

6 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Van Tuinen as discussed by the authors argued that the Baroque was a precursor to 20 th century modernism and in Deleuze's modernist allegiance several neo-mannerist tendencies, while the baroque pushes the anti-classical and revolutionary nature of mannerism to the extreme, it simultaneously and paradoxically forms a conservative and restorative reaction to it.
Abstract: Going by the titles of his books, Deleuze has proposed two philosophical concepts for styles from art history: expressionism and baroque. It is true that he discusses many other notions from the history of style, but these are the only ones that are truly made to ‘exist in themselves’. Or might there be a third, buried like a wedge between its two neighboring concepts? Although the notion of mannerism recurs in several of Deleuze’s writings, it is never developed in any systematic way. Even in The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque mannerism stays entirely subordinate to ‘its working relation with the baroque’. It is only in his last course at Vincennes, in which he draws a parallel between Michelangelo and Leibniz, that Deleuze wonders whether we possess ‘the means to give a certain philosophical consistency to the concept of mannerism’, which in addition he labels ‘the most evident, the most certain theme of our investigations this year’. My aim is to render mannerism separable again from the baroque. This will be done by putting attempts in art history and art criticism to give a definition of mannerism in interference with a close-reading of key passages in Deleuze’s work, especially from The Fold and Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation. From the concept of the ‘Figure’ developed in the latter, I will distillate an initial concept of mannerism as an art that proceeds by way of diagrammatic deformation. Subsequently, I will compare this concept to Deleuze’s concept of the Baroque (the ‘fold taken to infinity’) and argue that, while the baroque pushes the anti-classical and revolutionary ‘catastrophe’ of mannerism to the extreme, it simultaneously and paradoxically forms a conservative and restorative reaction to it. It is by exploring mannerism’s ‘very particular relations’ with the baroque, finally, that we can also discover in mannerism a precursor to 20 th century modernism and in Deleuze’s modernist allegiance several neo-mannerist tendencies. Mannerism, Baroque, and Modernism: Deleuze and the Essence of Art Sjoerd van Tuinen, 2012, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In The Beast and The Sovereign Volume 2, a collection of ten lectures focused on the "odd couple" of Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe, Derrida devotes a substantial portion of his second lecture to one of the most well-known scenes in Defoe's novel: Robinson's discovery of a man's naked foot on the shore as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In The Beast and The Sovereign Volume 2, a collection of ten lectures focused on the “odd couple” of Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe, Jacques Derrida devotes a substantial portion of his second lecture to one of the most well-known scenes in Defoe’s novel: Robinson’s discovery of “the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore” (Derrida 31, Defoe 162). Having lived alone on his island for fifteen years, Robinson is “thunder-struck,” as if having “seen an apparition” (162). After running up and down the shore in a failed effort to find additional prints, Robinson flees in terror to his “castle,” observing that “never frighted hare fled to cover, or fox to earth, with more terror of mine than I to this retreat” (162). To whom does this print belong? Is it proof that his greatest fear is soon to materialize—namely, that he will be savagely devoured by a group of cannibals whose habitation of the island he has long suspected? Or does the trace belong rather to another castaway like himself? Given his professed loneliness and alienation, Robinson could welcome rather than flee from this discovery of another human presence. Pondering his ironic reaction to the footprint, however, he notes that

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Derrida as discussed by the authors argued that the question is not that of sovereignty or non-sovereignty but that of the modalities of transfer and division of a sovereignty said to be indivisible.
Abstract: The study of sovereignty, as Derrida implies, is a branch of zoology. Throughout The Beast and the Sovereign, the posthumously published lecture notes for seminars that he held between 2001 and 2003, Derrida piles up literary citations, historical references and past philosophical arguments in which sovereignty reveals its animal features. Even if a strain of denunciation runs through this archival material, Derrida’s own interest is not in siding with humanity against the beast and the sovereign: “the question is not that of sovereignty or nonsovereignty but that of the modalities of transfer and division of a sovereignty said to be indivisible—said and supposed to be indivisible but always divisible” (B&S I 291). Sovereignty, in short, is to be deconstructed. Yet this programme behind the seminars, which establishes them in a continuity with all the other deconstructions that Derrida undertook from the 1960s onwards, might seem open to doubt on grounds that Derrida himself earlier articulated. The snag on which a deconstruction of sovereignty risks being caught is the non-deconstructibility of justice. Does the practicability of Derrida’s programme with regard to a deconstruction of sovereignty rely on a neglect of the role of justice in the definition and defense of the sovereign? More than a decade prior to the seminars, Derrida wrote: “Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible” (“The Force of Law” 14). Sovereignty, if it is to be deconstructed, must therefore be stripped of its claim to justice. Particularly in its pre-modern discourses, sovereignty cannot survive the disentanglement from justice, for it is in the name of a justice irreducible to the law that sovereignty defends its suspensions of the law. The polity that acknowledges the superiority of justice to positive law is more likely to give a hearing to a monarch’s insistence that he or she not be bound by the letter of the law: the royal prerogative takes its cue from the rulelessness of justice. In the Two Treatises of Government John Locke


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The publication of lectures inevitably raises questions about their place in the “work” of the author as discussed by the authors, and how do these lectures relate to Derrida's published works and what status should they be accorded within the corpus of his work?
Abstract: The publication of lectures inevitably raises questions about their place in the “work” of the author. How do these lectures relate to Derrida’s published works and what status should they be accorded within the corpus of his work? It is apparent that they are not texts fully worked up for publication, although some parts of them were published. As successive sessions within a year-long course, they are less formal and more discursive, if that is the right word, than many of the published works. They traverse a variety of themes, philosophemes, topics and concerns, with many digressions, including more than the occasional anecdote, personal remark or piece of Parisian gossip (such as the account in the Fifth Session of what Lacan supposedly said about Derrida, Abraham and Torok in a seminar “that has never been and no doubt never will be published” (BS As we shall shortly show” (7). We also see the occasional use of self-referentiality as in the Third Session, when he refers to his own power to defer the proposed demonstration of the thesis of Fontaine’s fable, and points out that he has already made use of

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors put away their term papers and put away the contents of their worktable, including pens, pencils, piles of books and papers, a terracotta bowl containing paper clips, a small crescent-moon tin from the 1950s with the image of a football player of the period, a half-finished jigsaw of a seventeenth-century Dutch interior, a toy skunk, a newly bound dissertation, a two-inch tall baobab tree lying on its side, a Venetian glass paperweight, a postcard of
Abstract: Prologue I am putting away my term. Yes, I am. A little late, but that’s the kind of term it was: things spill over, the boxes will not hold them. The course files are not yet in their folders, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. The season has turned and the objects on my worktable now stare back reproachfully like jetsam on a beach: pens, pencils, piles of books and papers, a terracotta bowl containing paper clips, a small crescent-moon tin from the 1950s with the image of a football player of the period, a half-finished jigsaw of a seventeenth-century Dutch interior, a toy skunk, a newly bound dissertation, a two-inch tall baobab tree lying on its side, a Venetian glass paperweight, a postcard of the Freud House in London and another of one of J.M. Gandy’s cut-away architectural views, an open wooden box from the Crescent dairy in Montreal containing cards and letters, a split ammonite from Madagascar (late Jurassic), five miniature foreign language dictionaries in a small red leather box, postage stamps from Romania and the Dominican Republic, another paperweight in the form of an iron lizard, a scattering of cigarette cards from the 1920s, and a glazed earthenware bird that whistles when you blow into its tail. And in the middle of all this, en abyme on the desktop of my MacBookPro 2.2, surrounded by graduate student term papers, thesis chapters, articles for review, annual reports, course outlines, program spreadsheets, committee minutes, reference letters, grant applications, downloaded pdfs of doubtful provenance and forgotten purpose – the debris, in other words, of another semester – sits what I’m looking for. I know it’s time to do something with it, to move it to safety, to airlift it out of the post-term ruins of everyday chaos and find it a home somewhere in the rabbit warren prosaically labeled “FILES.” But where does “Archive Anxiety.docx”


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Novalis as mentioned in this paper argues that the very fabric of thought and any possible Archimedean efficacy would have to engage at the level of that mediation, and that there is in Novalis's thought a media-theoretical core that surpasses even the important and neglected readings of his work by Friedrich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann.
Abstract: The Romantic Circumstance Romanticism was a philosophical movement concerned with the question of orders—orders of things, of persons, of being. Friedrich von Hardenberg, the Early German Romantic who called himself Novalis, writes that “only [the infinite stone] is firm (in itself) // it is the dos moi, pu sto [give me a place to stand] of Archimedes” (Hardenberg III 91). It is strange to find, among the foundational texts of Early German Romanticism, anything having to do with foundations. The movement has often been characterized as “anti-foundational” (Frank, Philosophical Foundations; Frank “Ordo inversus”) and even occasionalist (Schmitt). And yet statements revealing a fascination with figures of intervention, revolution, and altering are hardly rare in Novalis’s works. Novalis often speaks of a basis for such intervention, for complex attempts to intervene in the unstable natural and political orders already in transformation around him. Those orders set the rules for communication and action—they mediated philosophy, art, and politics. For Novalis, the very fabric of thought—and any possible Archimedean efficacy—would have to engage at the level of that mediation. Can there be a tool that crosses orders, that mediates or alters the rules for mediation? The answer, as I will suggest below, lies in the notion of mediation, and the possibility of altering the rules for media themselves. These concerns would coalesce in Novalis’s writings around the term “organ.” There is in Novalis’s thought a media-theoretical core that surpasses even the important and neglected readings of his work by Friedrich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann. A historiographical point—namely, that Romanticism has plenty to do with the “new” problematics emerging from the New German Media Theory conjuncture—will be complemented here by a philosophical point: that, at least in the case of Novalis, Romantic thought offers something media theory has not (and perhaps did not intend to). Novalis engages media down to the very fabric of his writings, a point on which both Kittler and Luhmann agree; he also, I claim, offers a written fabric meant to observe and effect medial change, and to move between emergent orders of media.1

Journal ArticleDOI
Nathalie Rachlin1
TL;DR: The Last Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d'Alexandre), a film about Alexander Medvedkin, one of the pioneers of early Soviet cinema as mentioned in this paper, was the inspiration for the Groupe Medvedkine, a film collective founded by Chris Marker and made up of French militant filmmakers who, in December 1967, decided to document the labor unrest that had erupted in factories near Besançon by making experimental films that involved the active participation of the workers themselves.
Abstract: The title of this essay is not to be taken literally: I will not be making the case that Marseille is actually the last working class city in France. My title is a reference to Chris Marker’s 1993 film The Last Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d’Alexandre), a film about Alexander Medvedkin, one of the pioneers of early Soviet cinema. Medvedkin was the inspiration for the Groupe Medvedkine, a film collective founded by Chris Marker and made up of French militant filmmakers who, in December 1967, decided to document the labor unrest that had erupted in factories near Besançon by making experimental films that involved the active participation of the workers themselves. Marker first met Medvedkin at a film festival in Leipzig in 1967 and their friendship lasted until 1988, the year of both Medvedkin’s death and the emergence of the perestroika movement in the USSR (Marker). Fascinated by a man who had for so long remained faithful to socialism, despite having suffered under Stalinist repression, Marker decided to make a film that would elucidate the reasons for Medvedkin’s life-long attachment to his ideals. As Marker writes in his blog, Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory:

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Derrida's lectures on La bete et le souverain, given at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales from 2001-2003, comprise a remarkable set of reflections on sovereignty and its opposition and overlap with bestiality.
Abstract: Jacques Derrida’s lectures on La bete et le souverain, given at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales from 2001-2003, comprise a remarkable set of reflections on sovereignty and its opposition and overlap with bestiality. Published in two volumes by Editions Galilee, and in English translation by the University of Chicago Press, they touch on familiar themes and concepts from Derrida’s broader work, such as sexual difference, the nature of reason, decision and responsibility, the religious basis of humanism and fraternalism and the community of fellows. Yet most centrally, they revolve around the question of the bete in Western thinking about sovereignty and humanity, making use of the discourse of the beast and of fabulous animals to deconstruct the “onto-theologico-political structure of sovereignty” (B&S I 46).1 Derrida’s seminar swarms with fabled creatures from the Bible and La Fontaine, as well as from Hobbes, Machiavelli and Schmitt. Derrida traces the figure of the wolf in an impressive range of sources. He takes on Deleuze’s studious sarcasm and Agamben’s scholarly tics. He reads the poetry of Celan and Lawrence, the novels of Valery and Defoe, prompting his auditors and readers to confront the philosophical ramifications of the richly fraught pairing of sovereignty and bestiality. In the second year of the course, he brings together two very different texts—Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics—around themes of world, solitude and encirclement. Musing obsessively on Celan’s line “There is no world, there are only islands,” he once more zeroes in on Heidegger’s famous claim that animals are poor in world, both having and not having world yet lacking properly human access to beings as such.2 Derrida’s recourse to the fable and to the deconstructive power of the fabulous animal in The Beast & the Sovereign might surprise some of his readers, especially those familiar with his book The Animal That Therefore

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Object Lessons as discussed by the authors is an attempt to examine the assumption that critical practice will be adequate to the political commitments that inspire it, and the remainder of the book is divided into chapters that examine the unexamined disciplinary logics that animate a particular identity-based knowledge.
Abstract: In her recent book Object Lessons, Robyn Wiegman invites those of us working in identity based studies—that is, fields such as Queer Studies, Women’s Studies, Intersectionality, Ethnic Studies—to ponder our disciplines’ “field imaginary”—the often taken for granted, “unconscious” assumptions that provide the conditions of possibility of our work. Arguing that “the operation of the political within identity-based fields has not been sufficiently engaged,” (13), she concludes that we have not sufficiently attended to our assumption that “if we only find the right discourse, object of study, or analytical tool, our critical practice will be adequate to the political commitments that inspire it” (2-3). Wiegman’s book is an attempt to do so. The remainder of the book is divided into chapters that each examine the unexamined disciplinary logics that animate a particular identity-based knowledge. As Wiegman repeatedly states, such an examination of one’s field’s “unconscious” is not precisely critique, and the recourse to psychoanalytic vocabulary is in part intended to remind us that we cannot simply step outside of these disciplinary logics and the conditions of possibility they provide. As a result, Wiegman’s book is at times painful to read, but in the way an analytical session can be painful, involving recognition, frustration, guilt, and denial. It reminds us that one of the reasons disputes in our fields can become, as Valerie Traub has recently described one such debate, “high octane,” (21), is that we are so psychically invested in “our belief in critical practice as an agent of social change” (Wiegman 10). Despite the fact that I am not a political scientist but rather someone who works in one of the identity-based knowledges whose field formation Wiegman interrogates—Queer Studies/Gender Studies, with a focus on literature and film—I was recently solicited, by an interdisciplinary journal with aspirations to investigate and interrogate the global, to review Michael J. Shapiro’s Studies in Transdisciplinary Method.1 As for why I was chosen for this project, I assume it was because my most recent book


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Archimedean point as mentioned in this paper is a simple and straightforward mechanical device that is both easy to visualize and abstract enough to make it transferable to almost any context, but it has rarely been the object of concrete analysis and historical contextualization.
Abstract: There is no authoritative biography of Archimedes, but there are moments from his life which, apocryphal or not, have become the stuff of legend. These include accounts of Archimedes running naked through the streets after realizing that his body displaces water in the bath (“Eureka!”), how he sat musing over diagrams in the sand as sword-bearing Romans descended upon him during a siege of Syracuse, and of course, his mechanically-informed claim that a firm resting place is all he would need to dislodge the world from its axis. This is the birth of the Archimedean point, which latter-day interpretations craft into a figure of thought that works according to the mechanical principle it describes: effortlessly, it turns a simple law of physics into an image of unlimited strength, absolute stability, and world mastery. 1 Both literally and figuratively, it aligns minimal with infinite force, immobility with movement, eccentricity—the point’s location outside the world it purports to dislodge—with centrality, the idea of a single location central to the actions of the world. But it is not merely the promise of sheer omnipotence that explains the extensive reception of Archimedes’ point in the history of Western thought. Equally important is the complexity and ambivalence of its pragmatic structure. Applied to the world as a whole, a straightforward mechanical device turns into a figure that is both easy to visualize and abstract enough to make it transferable to almost any context. The ambiguous, if not paradoxical structure of the Archimedean point also extends to its foundational gesture: even as it avows its point of absolute stability rhetorically—that is, even as it asserts firm ground—it simultaneously questions the possibility of its very existence. Despite the many prominent appearances of the Archimedean point throughout the history of Western thought, the figure itself has rarely been the object of concrete analysis and historical contextualization. Its explanatory force seems to have prevented the closer examination of it as a conceptual device. This oversight is indicative of the broad applicabil

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Renoir's La grande illusion (Grand Illusion) won the admiration of statesmen as diverse in political opinion as Benito Mussolini and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, prompting the latter to declare that all the democracies in the world must see this film as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In his recent article “Jean Renoir’s Timely Lessons for Europe,” New York Times film critic A.O. Scott recalls that when it was released worldwide in 1937, Renoir’s La grande illusion (Grand Illusion) won the admiration of statesmen as diverse in political opinion as Benito Mussolini and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, prompting the latter to declare “All the democracies in the world must see this film” (qtd. in Scott). The new digital restoration of La grande illusion has offered Scott the opportunity to school his contemporary America readers in the economic, social and political crises that gripped France, and much of continental Europe, when Renoir set out to make his now monumental and timeless contribution to world cinema. Scott acknowledges that history has marched on, significantly altering the societies and circumstances represented in La grande illusion. Yet he does find affinities between current conditions in Europe and those that troubled Renoir in the late 1930s when he formulated his poignant call for peace and understanding among European nations. To his mind,

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Luhmann as mentioned in this paper argued that it is no longer possible to imagine such an outside position for the observation of the whole, and that contemporary sociology can merely offer to reflect its own descriptions as being part of what they describe, reflecting its own refusal to adopt an ontological, subject-transcendental or epistemologically privileged position.
Abstract: The question of how our conception of the world could differ so widely from the disclosed nature of the world will with perfect equanimity be relinquished to the physiology and history of the evolution of organisms and concepts. (Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human 16). In an interview conducted by the Italian literary journal Alfabeta in April of 1987, 1 Niklas Luhmann was asked if sociology, in particular its systems-theoretical variant, could replace the privileged position that art, religion, philosophy, and politics had lost, and provide an Archimedean point from which to describe society as a whole. Luhmann responded that today it is no longer possible to imagine such an outside position for the observation of the whole, sociology being no exception. In its description of society, contemporary sociology can merely offer to reflect its own descriptions as being part of what they describe, and “reflect its own refusal to adopt an ontological, subject-transcendental or epistemologically privileged position” (Archimedes 165-6). 2 In the interview, Luhmann suggests that the forfeiting of an Archimedean viewpoint is what distinguishes his sociological theory from the Old-European tradition. In the latter, we are “always dealing with descriptions from an outside, for example, through the mediation of a subject. Traditional logic or traditional ontology always presupposed an external observer who was in the position to distinguish between false and correct, that is, who could apply a bivalent logic in its observations” (164). Alternatively, Luhmann’s adaptation of systems theory is an attempt to construct an epistemology that would not assume such an “outside” position for its observations, but includes “the observer and observational instruments” in its observation. Simply put, systems theory acknowledges what the assumption of an Archimedean point hides—namely that what one observes is what it is only by virtue of how it is being observed. Not restricting observation to attentive sensual perception, but defining it more broadly as any operation that draws a distinction and indicates one of its sides, Luhmann reads the spatial distinction between


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the preface to a slender volume entitled La communaute affrontee, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “The present state of the world is not a war of civilizations. It is a civil war: it is the internecine war of a city, of a civility of a citizenry [citadinite] that are being deployed up until the limits of this world, and because of this, up to the extremity of their own concepts”.
Abstract: In the preface to a slender volume entitled La communaute affrontee, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “The present state of the world is not a war of civilizations. It is a civil war: it is the internecine war of a city, of a civility, of a citizenry [citadinite] that are being deployed up until the limits of this world, and because of this, up until the extremity of their own concepts” (11). Globalization, or the limitless expansion of the West driven by totalizing notions such as “History, Science, Capital, Man and/or their Nothingness” reaches a point where such concepts must of necessity break apart, where “a distended figure bursts, [and] a chasm appears” (13, 1). This chasm signals a rent in the supposedly unified essence of a community, a tear within the fullness of an immanence completely present to itself. The gap is the sign of a community confronted with itself [“la communaute . . . affrontee a elle-meme” (17)], or rather, exposed to itself at its limit, facing the outside with which it is joined edge to edge. In an earlier essay entitled La communaute desoeuvree (first published in 1983 and translated as The Inoperative Community), Nancy notes that it is at this point of withdrawal or retreat from the infinite plenitude of communal fusion, from within the divide of this separation (le partage in French is both a division and a sharing) that a thinking of community, of a being-with or a being-in-common can take place. A being-in-common is a being-together of singularities that cannot be welded together into the unicity of a single being of togetherness. Nancy describes the experience of community as the “clear consciousness of the communal night – this consciousness at the extremity of consciousness” (19). Community takes place in an exposure to the outside of a self, in a consciousness of the difference of immanence from itself. Three years after the initial publication of La communaute desoeuvree, and the same year that Nancy’s essay appears alongside two other reflective pieces on community in book form, the Indian postcolonial critic Partha Chatterjee cautions against the boundless reach of Enlightenment Reason, which coopts the political legitimacy of anticolonial and postcolonial struggles in Asia and Africa by viewing them as dark, atavistic,



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Mens et al. as mentioned in this paper describe the first near-complete and also tea-based experience of involuntary memory had by the would-be-writer narrator "Marcel" of A la recherche du temps perdu, which as you may not know was the second novel Proust never finished writing, the first of these having been Jean Santeuil.
Abstract: Marcel Proust, as a writer, was even more, shall we say (in order to invoke the first near-complete and also tea-based experience of involuntary memory had by the would-be-writer narrator “Marcel” of A la recherche du temps perdu, which as you may not know was the second novel Proust never finished writing, the first of these having been Jean Santeuil), “steeped” in literary work by others than were so steeped such equally “classic,” as they are by now called, or “canonical” twentiethcentury novelists as James Joyce, who, like Proust, seems to have had but in fact did not have a photographic memory, and Vladimir Nabokov, who did have one, or than are such literary critics (for Proust, at heart, was a critic) as the neo-conservative and photographic-memory-blessed – or perhaps cursed – Harold Bloom, who does not appear to have been quite so, well, influential as I imagine he would like to be, and – of course I do feel some anxiety here about naming myself – the non-neo-conservative, non-photographic-memory-blessed, and equally non-influential Kevin Kopelson. In her latest and perhaps most beautifully conceived book, Monsieur Proust’s Library, the biographer Anka Muhlstein demonstrates – nearly completely, as I myself will demonstrate – just how steeped in or, to use her own metaphor, “absorbed” by such other work Proust was. (Monsieur Proust’s Library, moreover, is very beautifully written – not to mention well worth your reading. Muhlstein is never guilty of the kind of Proustian pastiche that I’ll soon stop – so serio-comically – attempting here. Nor is she plagued by the kind of logorrhea that in the final analysis caused the incompletion of A la recherche – although not the incompletion of Jean Santeuil. She achieves, instead, in this very brief book, an engaging, engrossing, and I must say [having chosen this metaphor while very aware, as I hope you’ll soon be too, of an interesting irony involved, while also aware, unhappily, that the choice may seem to some like plagiarism] conversational style throughout. “Whether they follow an established tra-