This book argues that the negotiation of agency is central not only to the experience of war but also to its representation in cultural expressions, ranging from a notion of disablement, expressed in victimization, immobilization, traumatization, and death, to enablement, expressed in the perpetration of heroic, courageous, skillful, and powerful actions of assertion and dominance. In order to illustrate this thesis, it provides a comprehensive analysis of literary representations of the American War of Independence from 1775, the beginning of (...) the war, up until roughly 1860, when the Civil War marked a decisive historical turning point. As the first national war, it has an unquestionably exemplary status for the development of American conceptions of war. The in-depth study of exemplary texts from a variety of genres and by authors like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, and Herman Melville, demonstrates that the overall character of Revolutionary War literature presents the war as a forum in which collective and individual agency is expressed, defended, and cultivated. It uses the military environment in order to teach the values of discipline and self-subordination to a communal good, which are perceived as basic principles of a Republican virtue to guide the actions of the autonomous individual in a popular democracy. (shrink)

THE opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence invokes, as every American should know, "the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God." The import of this invocation may be discerned by examining the appeals to natural law in the polemical literature of the American revolutionary period against the background of natural law/natural rights philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, within the particular historical context of events constituting the (...) American Revolution. The phrase "the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God" in the Declaration is revealing. It simplifies what had, in earlier times, been referred to as "fundamental law," omitting and de-emphasizing, however, some rather essential elements. Historically, fundamental law had always been esteemed to be a law superior to statutory or positive law. Unless the latter conforms to the former, it is not valid, and invalid positive laws are null and void, so that there is no obligation to obey them. In the history of British jurisprudence, which includes colonial American jurisprudence, fundamental law embraced divine law, natural law, the British constitution beginning with Magna Carta, common law, and the colonial charters. Appeals to fundamental law were made when protesting statutory or positive laws and decrees. Thus the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress in October, 1774, invokes "the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the British constitution, and the several charters and compacts" as the moral, rational, and ultimate legal basis for protesting alleged British encroachments on American rights. Yet less than two years later, the Declaration of Independence, abandoning the British constitution and dissolving the political band—the charters and compacts—between Great Britain and America, rests simply on "the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.". (shrink)

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates (...) African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois’s Hegelian concept of ‘double consciousness’, as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system. (shrink)

"The sixties' political agenda may have been ground down to ambiguity at best, but moral and spiritual America will never again be quite what it was before the coming of the hippies, and Miller has shown how and why."—Robert S. Ellwood, University of Southern California The hippies of the late 1960s were cultural dissenters who, among other things, advocated drastic rethinking of certain traditional American values and standards. In this lucid, lively survey, Timothy Miller traces the movement's ethical innovations (...) and analyzes the impact of its ideas on subsequent American culture. Dedicated to such tenets as the primacy of love, trust in intuition and direct experience, the rejection of meaningless work, and a disdain for money and materialism, the hippies advocated dropping out of the dominant culture, and proposed new and more permissive ethics in several areas. They argued that, while some drugs were indeed harmful, others provided useful insights and experiences and therefore should be freely available and widely used. They endorsed a liberal ethics of sex, in which no sexual act between or among consenting adults would be banned. They developed an ethics of rock-and-roll music, arguing that rock was the language of a generation and that it helped promote new ways of thinking and living. They also revived the venerable American tradition of communal living. In contrast to most available literature on the 1960s, this book deals with the cultural revolutionaries and not the political radicals of the New Left. And instead of relying on later interviews with persons who were active in the 1960s, Miller draws mainly on underground newspapers of the day, the most important literary creation of the hippies themselves. The result is a historical encounter of rare immediacy. Timothy Miller is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas. (shrink)

The American School of Empire considers how an American idea of empire evolved in the 1790s and would shape and be shaped by the literature and art of the early US. Hamilton's introductory essay suggests that empire was as important to the foundation of the US as concepts like democracy, freedom, nation, and republic. This book thus begins from the premise that the history of empire in the United States can be traced back to the inception of the (...) country, if not earlier. It contends that the United States was conceived as an empire, culturally, politically, and legally. Empire, as a broad theory for organizing not only the state but also the understanding of difference and the relationship to space, in other words, was a crucial conceptual frame shaping the culture of the early US"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Tally reviews Loren Goldner's Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic King, which posits that Melville was the American Marx, exposing the crisis of bourgeois ideology in the revolutionary period around 1848. In this, Goldner follows a tradition of Marxian scholarship of Melville, notably including C.L.R. James, Michael Paul Rogin, and Cesare Casarino. Tally concludes that Goldner's argument, while interesting, is limited by its focus on American exceptionalism and by ignoring the postnational force of Melville's novels.

A sizeable body of literature suggests that informal methods of dispute resolution — and, in particular, conciliation — flourish only in societies marked by extensive social hierarchy. Given this literature, it is quite surprising to discover that in the mid-nineteenth century, the United States embarked on an extensive debate regarding whether to adopt "conciliation courts," whose primary function was to reconcile the disputants by persuading them to embrace an equitable compromise. First created by the French Revolutionaries in 1790, conciliation courts (...) were widely established throughout continental Europe. Observing this development, leading American lawyers and politicians pondered seriously whether the United states ought to follow suit. Debate over whether to embrace such institutions occurred at the very highest of levels, and a series of states enacted constitutional provisions authorizing their legislatures to create conciliation courts. Ultimately, however, despite the widespread interest in such institutions, these were never established — except in the notable case of the Freedmen’s Bureau courts of the Reconstruction South. This Article explores this largely forgotten episode in American legal history. It examines why a nation that was radically egalitarian by standards of the time would seriously consider embracing an institution that we tend more commonly to associate with inegalitarian, strongly hierarchical societies — and why, after coming so close to adopting conciliation courts, it ultimately failed to do so. In the process, by situating the debate over conciliation courts in a broader social and legal context, the Article also excavates the origins of the modern, quintessentially American commitment to the virtues of formal, adversarial process. (shrink)

The separation of church and state disguised the coordination of two very different conceptions of liberty at work in Revolutionary America, one with a religious basis in radical Protestant thought and the other with a legal basis in the secular Enlightenment. The essay combines the disciplines of law, literature, and intellectual history to investigate these contrasting formulations and their changing relationship. Cross-cultural analysis of the language of protest in both England and America gives the investigation a crucial focus. It (...) also explains a larger movement from direct influence to refraction in Anglo-American relations. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us (...) to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

This book propels the study of American revolutionary and radical Thomas Paine into the twenty-first century by engaging an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars in an exploration of Paine's role in politics, literature, and the invention of the global.

Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Introduction: in the spirit of Zora : traveling with the "eternal feminine" -- Returning to the margin : changed -- African American literature : like a bridge over troubled water -- Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes : envisioning the (new) "Negro artist" -- Striking down colorism in color struck : a play in four scenes -- We are not tragically colored -- Langston Hughes writing about the "the Negro artist and the racial mountain" -- (...) Transgressing boundaries of white male power in the ways of white folks -- Blackness from the inside out -- Seeing "women loving women" -- Black female journey to sexual in(sight)fullness -- "What if Mama finds out?" : entering a life-changing place of self-liberation -- When "nobody was lesbian, nobody was feminist, nobody was gay" -- Higher education that makes a difference -- "Still children of the night" : survivors against the odds -- Black boys' lives still matter : in search of a loving father -- "Spilled salt" on a Black mother's table and the struggle for maternal survival -- No shame: recovering our mother's way(s) of being -- Remembering where we came from -- Getting to the heart of the lessons : Black women teaching "other" ways of loving -- Epilogue: continuing to teach in the image of "an alternative Black man" -- It's about revolutionary manhood. (shrink)

When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the book exploded into women's consciousness. Before the decade was out, what had begun as a campaign for women's civil rights transformed into a diverse and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that challenged many aspects of everyday life long accepted as fixed: work, birth control and abortion, childcare and housework, gender, class, and race, art and literature, sexuality and identity, rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography, and more. (...) This was the women's liberation movement, and writing--powerful, personal, and prophetic--was its beating heart. Fifty years on, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, this visionary and radical writing is as relevant and urgently needed as ever, ready to inspire a new generation of feminists. Activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works--many long out-of-print and hard to find--that catalyzed and propelled the women's liberation movement. Ranging from Friedan's Feminine Mystique to Backlash, Susan Faludi's Reagan-era requiem, and framed by Shulman and Moore with an introduction and headnotes that provide historical and personal context, the anthology reveals the crucial role of Black feminists and other women of color in a decades long mass movement that not only brought about fundamental changes in American life--changes too often taken for granted today--but envisioned a thoroughgoing revolution in society and consciousness still to be achieved"--Back cover. (shrink)

"One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy." -- J. Hillis Miller, Yale University Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. (...) Thirty years later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable. (shrink)

Octavio Paz: Ontology and Surrealism discusses poet Octavio Paz (1914-1998), one of Mexico's most controversial intellectuals. Over several decades, Paz has been celebrated for his impact on literature and culture as a poet as well as an essayist, and he is recognized as a great thinker and as a student of German ontology and phenomenology. Roberto Sanchez Benitez analyzes in detail Paz's training within the European philosophical thinking of the twentieth century, as well as in the artistic avant-garde, to illustrate (...) the way in which philosophical, anthropological, linguistic, sociological, literary, and artistic proposals enriched his work and Mexican culture during the post-revolutionary period. Sanchez Benitez posits that Paz moved from a phenomenological ontology to a historicism of the human condition, wherein morality, politics, and the arts all reside in an ideological context where dogmatisms where impose in the face of a lack of internal criticism. This book explores the themes of the poetic act that Paz associated with his ontological and surrealist readings, leading up to when they were transformed by his experience in India and the assimilation of Eastern philosophies, along with going through a set of Western proposals relating to love, eroticism, and art. Scholars of literature, philosophy, Latin American Studies, and history will find this book particularly useful. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 43-56 [Access article in PDF] Jack London's Medusa of Truth Per Serritslev Petersen FROM THE VERY START of his literary career, Jack London believed that a good fiction writer must also be a good thinker—that fictional authenticity and integrity must somehow be imbedded in philosophical authenticity and integrity. In his early essay "On the Writer's Philosophy of Life," and in his early letters to (...) Cloudsley Johns, his intellectually "slovenly" friend (who also happened to share his literary ambitions and interests), London insists, again and again, on the proper philosophical foundation of the successful writer. This is how poor Cloudsley, who had previously been told to "get in and systematically ground [himself] in history, economics, biology and the kindred branches" 1 gets browbeaten by his self-appointed mentor and master, a veritable Jack of all trades, in a letter dated March 15, 1900: "To be well fitted for the tragedy of existence (intellectual existence), one must have a working philosophy, a synthesis of things. Have you a synthesis of things? Do you write, and talk, and build upon a foundation which you know is securely laid? Or do you not rather build with a hazy idea of 'to hell with the foundation.'" London then proceeds to catechize his friend on scientific principles such as the indestructibility of Matter, the persistence of Force, and the overall "dynamic principle, true of the metamorphosis of the universe"—principles that Cloudsley is urged to study "carefully and painstakingly" before he can ever claim to have "a firm foundation for [his] philosophy of life" (Letters, pp. 170-71).In London's admittedly heavy-handed ad hominem argument, one recognizes the philosophical sledgehammer of Ernest Everhard, the revolutionary hero of The Iron Heel and one of the fictional exponents of "that cold forbidding philosophy, materialistic monism," 2 which also [End Page 43] served as the scientific foundation of London's own philosophy of life. There are, however, not one, but two components to London's philosophy, which, as I shall argue in this essay, together constitute an essentially dialectical construction, a dynamic juxtaposition of and negotiation with, on the one hand, the "cold forbidding" Medusa of Truth and, on the other hand, the life-enhancing Aphrodite of Romance, the second of which is one of several versions of the vital Maia-Lie (Maia being the Buddhist term for the power that creates or re-creates the world as cosmic illusion).Two points need to be stressed from the outset. First, London's work is implicitly aligned with literary naturalism—the "Zolaistic Movement" of modern American fiction that the genteel writer and editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich famously condemned for its "miasmatic breath" 3 —even though London himself would always qualify his own naturalism by insisting that, artistically, he was "an emotional materialist" (Letters, p. 329), and that his realism was, in the words of Martin Eden, one of his fictional alter egos, "an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration and faith." 4 Second, London's work is explicitly aligned with philosophical naturalism (as distinct from supernaturalism)—that is, naturalism as the philosophical or epistemological view that, to quote The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995), "everything is natural, i.e. that everything there is belongs to the world of nature, and so can be studied by the methods appropriate for studying that world." In philosophical practice, naturalism and materialism have tended to coalesce, materialism being basically understood as the view that everything is made of matter, which can be studied by the methods of natural science. Like London's philosophical alter ego Ernest Everhard (and also like fictional protagonists such as Wolf Larsen and Martin Eden), London declared himself "a materialistic monist," although, as he admitted to Cloudsley Johns, "there is dam little satisfaction in it." Rhetorically impersonating, as it were, Wolf Larsen, London, in the same letter, asks himself and his correspondent, "what squirming anywhere, damned or otherwise, means anything? That's the question I am always prone to put: What's this chemical ferment called life about? Small wonder that small men... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Seven Poems NICOLAS CALAS (Translated by Avi Sharon) hellenizing surrealism: a greek door to europe Nicolas calas (Kalamares) may be considered merely a minor Greek poet, but he had a major global persona and influence. In the middle of the last century he played a catalyzing role in the international avant garde: He was a Zelig-like polemicist in three languages (Greek, French, and English) and across three cultural (...) capitals (Athens, Paris, and New York). But he always fought on a singular front: surrealism. Born in Lausanne in 1907, he grew up in Athens and by the later 1920s began to stand out in literary circles (he was over 6' 4") for his modernist if not revolutionary views. Starting from an interest in Freud and Marx, the subconscious and the revolutionary, Calas soon arrived at their natural synthesis—surrealism. Around the time when a distinctly Greek form of surrealist poetry emerged, with the 1935 publication of “Blast Furnace” by Andreas Embiricos, Calas was on his way to becoming its unofficial spokesman. He moved to the epicenter of the movement in Paris and with the 1938 publication of Foyers d’Incendie became the “most lucid and audacious” of founder André Breton’s acolytes, both prophet and demagogue of the group. Carried along in the current of European artists and thinkers leaving Europe for New York, he would continue the fight on the western wing of the faction (literally, coming to blows at a cocktail party with Clement Greenberg, representing the opposing Abstract Expressionist side). In 1942 he published another clarion pamphlet, Confound the Wise, giving the movement voice in English and befriending its most visible local supporters and practitioners, from Peggy Guggenheim to Marcel Duchamp. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 The Wyndham Lewis of the operation, Calas was a cross-border catalyst, evangelizing the role of surrealism as a liberating and generative force in modern literature and art. For him and other writers and poets, the weapon that would most effectively derange the reader’s habitual conformism into revelatory and revolutionary perception was the surrealist image, poetry’s lingua franca. For Greek practitioners it was completely natural for that magical representation to arise out of their god-infested, sun-filled landscape. Here they had a force that was both blinding and enlightening, penetrating and transformative, local and universal. For Calas, the primary echo or reflection of that essential image was the island of Santorini, referenced in several of the translations here (and reminiscent of his fellow national Nikos Gatsos’s use of the island of Amorgos in a similar context). It stood as the very symbol of fiery transformation, an image monstrous enough to shock the reader into a super-rational embrace of its own form of logic. This Hellenization of surrealism, like the Hellenization of modernism itself, was to become an important, transformative power in its own right. For many, the origin (and likewise, for many, the enclosing border ) of surrealism was France. “But it is French. It is their invention,” was how William Carlos Williams saw it, to his chagrin. Williams was convinced that the objective concentration on the image itself (“no ideas but in things”) could offer a salutary corrective to American poetry of his time. “It is the surrealists who have invented the living defense of literature,” he wrote in a 1929 essay. But for a poet so at one with the American Grain to be reconciled with surrealism’s ‘Francite’ he needed some way to cross the divide. His admiration for Calas’s work in clarifying and promoting the group’s ideas enabled the Greek poet to serve as a mediator, to allow the creative transference of its rebellious wisdom into Williams’s poetry. To borrow the title of one of his early American essays, Calas provided Williams a “Greek door to Europe.” In translating four of Calas’s French poems into English, published in 1941 with a frontispiece by the surrealist painter and magician Kurt Seligman, Williams leveraged Calas as the vehicle through which the “enabling foreignness” of surrealism could be grafted into the grain of his American modernist work, just as he set out on his magnum opus, Paterson. In a similar way... (shrink)

Since literary historian Robert Bone published his seminal essay ‘Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance’ in 1986, scholars have created new cartographies of previously unexplored terrain in American cultural history. The earliest studies focused on literature, but more recently attention has turned to other disciplines, including visual arts. Recent publication of The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (2011) by Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage promises to decisively broaden scholarly understandings of the scope (...) and significance of Chicago-centred cultural production during the Great Depression and post-war years. Of particular relevance to contemporary studies of new media art is the manner in which then-emergent ideas and practices – centring on racialized subject matter, elite and mass audiences, traditional and new mediums of expression, private vs public sponsorship, and passive vs active reception of art objects – converged to create new paradigms and possibilities for visual artists to reshape consciousness in a period of institutional collapse and change. Chicago’s New Negro artists of the 1930s and 1940s, like their counterparts in 1920s Harlem, sought to reframe perceptions of African American life, to re-present the black subject as something other than an object of contempt or amusement beneath the privileged gaze of the white viewer. Just as these artists sought to revise perceptions of racial reality, examination of the wide range of actual images they created and the mediums and styles they explored revises reductive notions about creative expression in this period, which often portray a mere subordination of art to propaganda and an embrace of representational aesthetics and simplistic narratives in a fruitless detour in the evolution from modernism to postmodernism. On the contrary, Andrew Hemingway notes the range of stylistic experiment and characterizes so-called ‘social art’ as ‘a hybrid and unstable mode [which] had to carry the imperative to be an art equal in formal achievement to both the great art of the past and the modern tradition … [and] to suggest a political orientation without becoming overt revolutionary propaganda’ (2002).New media theorist Oliver Grau observes thatIn many quarters, virtual reality is viewed as a totally new phenomenon… but it did not make its first appearance with the technical invention of computer-aided virtual realities. On the contrary, virtual reality forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images… grounded in art traditions that have receivedscant attention up to now.(2004)In the midst of another period of change, of transformed and transforming ideas and practices in the arts, we have much to learn from the attempts of Chicago’s New (Media) Negro artists to create ‘art for the people’, to immerse broad audiences in such accessible media as mural painting, photography and graphic arts. (shrink)

The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a (...) series of footnotes to Plato.”If so, then Russian thought needs to be understood as an important part of the Western philosophical heritage, given that it offers perhaps the most elaborate set of footnotes to Plato's most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic and the Laws. The status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato's vision of them as ontological and political entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as distinct from mere epistemic units or tools of cognition. The Platonic tendency to integrate and implement religious, philosophical, and political teachings culminated in twentieth-century Russia. In the Soviet state, perhaps more than anywhere else in history, philosophy became a supreme legal and political institution, acquiring the power of a suprapersonal, universal reason. Hence thought itself, in the moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the social structures that Soviet ideocracy erected on a philosophical foundation. In discussing Russian philosophy, we inevitably consider the practical application of Platonic conceptions by the Soviet ideocracy to a state in which philosophy was called upon to rule.According to Sergei Averintsev, the emphasis on Platonism in the Russian intellectual tradition is nothing to be proud of; it should rather be lamented and repented. Despite the obvious Platonic preferences of Russian thinkers (from Ivan Kireyevsky to Aleksei Losev), Averintsev asks whether even now we might be able to reorient the tradition toward Aristotle instead—toward a more secular, tolerant, and analytic philosophy of human nature. “If Plato is the first utopian,” Averintsev writes, “Aristotle is the first thinker to look the spirit of utopia right in the eye and overcome it.... Aristotle's technique of thought is more neutral toward religion than is Plato's ecstasy.” Characteristically, the name index to the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought contains almost twice as many mentions of Plato as of Aristotle.Each national tradition has its own “strange attractor,” as they say now in complexity theory. English empiricism, French rationalism, German Idealism, American pragmatism... However stereotypical these generalizations are, they help to clarify the nations’ distinctive contributions to philosophy. Where does Russia stand in this row? I think that Caryl Emerson is correct to pinpoint, among the most distinctive features of the Russian intellectual tradition, the striving for “wholeness” (tselostnost’). Many Russian thinkers seem to evade definitive and particular “isms,” preferring to find ways of complementing (and thus diluting) those that are on offer. Faced with the claims for rationalism, for example, the Russian response tends to be that true rationality is or should be coupled with fullness of feeling. The characteristic Russian “ism” is at best “holism,” at worst “totalitarianism,” and is usually directed against Western thought. Kireyevsky declares: There [in the West] is a bifurcation [razdvoenie] of the spirit, a bifurcation of thoughts, a bifurcation of the sciences, a bifurcation of the state, a bifurcation of estates, a bifurcation of society, a bifurcation of family rights and duties, a bifurcation of morality and the heart.... In Russia, on the contrary, there is a predominant tendency toward the wholeness of the inner and the outer, of public and moral being.Vladimir Solovyov held that the goal of all knowledge was to comprehend “total unity” and to overcome all kinds of unilateralism, which he referred to as “abstract elements” (otvlechennye nachala). These one-sided elements included Realism, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism, all of which had been advanced by Western philosophical movements.Reading the Handbook, I was struck by how steadily, from one thinker to another, the concept of “unity” is reiterated in various synonyms and contexts: “all-unity,” “wholeness,” “totality,” “integrity,” “edinstvo,” “tsel'nost,’” “tselostnost,” “sobornost,” and so forth. Russian thinkers endeavor not to create something original and special but to unify everything that has already been done and known. Consider opponents, like the Slavophiles and Westernizers; take Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, Kireyevsky and Alexander Herzen, Dostoevsky and Solovyov—all are united by this “super-idea,” proclaiming its embodiment to be the all-embracing vocation of the Russian people. At the same time, they sharply reject all “private principles” and “trashy certainty” (Belinsky's driannaia opredelennost’)—anything that restricts and divides individuals or nations. All these forms of privacy and particularity must be overcome on the way to a universal whole that is even greater in scale than Western Catholicism. According to this logic of totality, we would be better off left with nothing than to be content with the particular and the limited. The first original Russian thinker, Chaadaev (1794–1856), makes the salto mortale of declaring Russia a country that has given nothing to the world, then proclaiming that Russia's destiny is to rise above the rest of the world and resolve all its contradictions. From nothing to everything: such are the philosophical foundations for the totalitarian aspiration of Russian thought, which eventually expressed itself in the revolutionary movements and communist experiments of the twentieth century.As is well known, Russian literature is considered in the West a far more powerful and original expression of philosophical ideas than Russian philosophy as such. Characteristically, then, almost half of the Handbook, its entire second part, is devoted to the dialogue of Russian philosophy with literature and art. As M. N. Forster remarks in the Handbook's concluding essay: “It is natural to wonder why this striking asymmetry between relatively modest achievements in pure philosophy and spectacularly high achievements in literature came about.” To the literary focus of Russian philosophy, we can add a political focus. At least a third of part one of the Handbook is devoted to Russian political and revolutionary philosophy, to Lenin and other Marxists, to Ivan Ilyin, and so on. In this context, both literature and politics assumed philosophical dimensions, often overshadowing philosophy itself.Bertrand Russell lamented that the system of philosophical categories in the West featured mostly nouns (being, consciousness, idea, matter, substance, and so forth), omitting adjectives, verbs, prefixes, and other parts of speech. This criticism should be applied to the category philosophy itself. Why the noun philosophy rather than the adjective philosophical, which can be applied to many areas of activity and creativity, including literature and politics?In Russian intellectual history, the philosophical, rather than philosophy, is the predominant category. The state, ideology, economics, politics and geopolitics, literature, art, warfare, space exploration—all these spheres in Russia and the USSR have been and remain abundantly philosophical, subordinated to certain philosophical tasks, though philosophy as such has never been as developed and sophisticated as in the West. As a discipline, Western philosophy “outsourced” itself to Russian disciples, leaving it to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky, to test in literary and political practices a host of Western philosophical ideas, from those of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel to those of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.Likewise, the verb to philosophize is used in ways unusual and awkward in the West. “It is characteristic of the Russian people to philosophize [filosofstvovat'],” as Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “An illiterate Russian peasant likes to pose questions of a philosophical nature—about the meaning of life, about God, about eternal life, about evil and untruth, about how to realize the Kingdom of God.” The philosophical and philosophizing, as attributes and actions of the state and society, overpowered philosophy as a noun—as an academic discipline, if you will. Russian philosophy has had a very modest impact on the West, but the impact of the philosophical has been immense. Nineteenth-century Russian literature influenced Western culture with its philosophical interrogations and existential dilemmas, just as, in the twentieth century, the USSR influenced the West with the philosophical ideas (Marxism, materialism, dialectics, collectivism, socialism, communism) that determined Soviet ideology, politics, and economics.In the USSR of the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, philosophy as an independent academic subject was in a subdued position, as a servant of party ideology. But, meanwhile, the sphere of the philosophical spread to such distant domains as theater (Stanislavsky), physiology (Pavlov), and agriculture (Michurin), with all such activities glorified and sponsored by the state as “philosophically correct”—as faithful to “materialism” and “Realism.” Paradoxically, in the quintessentially philosophical state that was the USSR, the state of philosophy, with the repression of all independent thought and thinkers, was miserable. The fateful and often disastrous originality of Russian philosophy consisted precisely in its dissemination to other areas, in an act of kenosis or self-transcendence that can be viewed both as an aggressive philosophical appropriation of politics, economics, ideology, and literature—and as philosophy's sacrificial devotion to the world beyond its professional boundaries.So there are three features that make Russian thought relevant and dangerous: its Platonic utopian aspiration; its spirit of totality; and its tendency to transcend the boundaries of academic philosophy and to philosophize society, politics, and life in general. Russian philosophy has not been as good at explaining the world as at changing it, sometimes ethically and poetically, sometimes violently and aggressively. Teachers and students of Russian culture should be deeply motivated to draw more attention to the philosophical in Russia and to raise its status in the Western academy. In my view, we would do better service to Russian philosophy if we are frank enough to qualify it as dangerous, sometimes very toxic and addictive, fraught with totalistic tendencies. This philosophy is the voice of the “underground,” both in the Dostoevskian and Leninist senses.At the same time, however, the antidotes concocted in the Russian metaphysical laboratory are of enormous value: the Russian versions of personalism, existentialism, secular and religious liberalism, neorationalism, culturology, conceptualism, and postmodernism. These movements, which counteract totalization, need to be studied precisely because they were cooked up and tested under the same extreme conditions in which the most dangerous intellectual poisons have been produced. (shrink)

This article offers an innovative perspective on the literary landscapes of the 1960s in France, Ukraine, and the USA serving as exemplars of a global literary project that views literary works as heterotopias that, while being distinct, collectively constitute a cohesive whole. Using a comparative approach, complemented with distant reading techniques, the study examines how these literary realms are interconnected, revealing shared aesthetic foundations guided by an overarching law. This law, rooted in Theodor Adorno’s concept of negativity, becomes evident in (...) in countercultural movements and consequential shifts in literary form, content, and canon. While not the primary focus of analysis, other unifying elements in this global literary panorama include dissent as defined by Jaques Rancière, and a Sartrian-infused interpretation of existentialism. The article suggests that this global phenomenon may have emerged due to the confluence of two factors: the seismic global impact of events like WWII and the evolving postmodern trajectory of the era. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Reviewing: A Response to Mary Ann StankiewiczRalph A. Smith, Professor EmeritusI very much appreciate the positive comments made by Mary Ann Stankiewicz in her review published in Studies in Art Education of my Readings in Discipline-Based Art Education: A Literature of Educational Reform.1 I was gratified to read that she believes the volume is a comprehensive and valuable guide that all art educators should own as a reference (...) source for the intellectual history of American art education in the late-twentieth century. Stankiewicz further notes my steadfastness in holding to a vision ofaesthetic education that is firmly rooted in the humanities and my forthrightness in acknowledging that a different choice of selections might well convey a somewhat different picture of Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE). Between encomia, however, Stankiewicz raises questions about my editorial politics (that is, opportunities editors have to make selections they think are important) and my views about art education.The format of Stankiewicz's review was patterned after an essay in the volume by Frances Schoonmaker who discusses the professional preparation of teachers in terms of autobiography, school contexts, and scholarship. Accordingly, Stankiewicz recalls in some detail her own extensive participation in the Getty's educational venture in art education. And instead of referring to the Introduction's discussion of historical antecedents of DBAE she provides her own account of events that were contemporaneous with Getty's period of operation and refers to some currents of contemporary thinking. In other words, she does not give the kind of space to the book's contents that reviewers usually do.2 This prompted me to recall some material from the book's Introduction, which is followed by a sketch of the DBAE literature project that furnished the impetus for the volume and rejoinders to some of Stankiewicz's concerns.DBAE RememberedThe Getty Center for Education in the Arts (later renamed the Getty Education Institute for the Arts and eventually discontinued) flourished mainly in the 1980s and 1990s and proceeded under the banner of DBAE. The Getty's notion of DBAE supported a major trend that had been growing in the field since the mid-1950s. In this respect the Getty initiative was neither novel nor revolutionary. Yet by correcting an error of certain reform movements, namely those whose tendency was to bypass professionals in the field, it did constitute a significant venture. Getty officers perceived the field to be [End Page 93] moving in the direction of strengthening the content of art education with additional content that was believed requisite for an intelligent and sensitive engagement with works of art. In effect the Getty position argued that a well-developed sense of art is composed not just of the rudiments of artistic creation art but also those of a number of other relevant disciplines, for example the interrelated disciplines of art making, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics (usually understood as the philosophy of art). It was acknowledged that these were not the only disciplines relevant to art education, but they were considered to be basic. Nor was it believed that these disciplines should be taught as separate subjects; rather, they were meant to suggest content and useful modes of inquiry. As Stankiewicz notes, DBAE endorsed both the substantive and procedural dimensions of the cognitive revolution that was occurring in thinking about mind and learning. Indeed, mind building emerged as one of the major themes in the theory underlying the Getty approach.3Not surprisingly, the Getty approach had its critics. As pointed out in my "Afterthoughts,"the Getty initiative was contemporaneous with the increasing politicization of cultural and educational life.4 The critical literature produced in this climate — subscribing variously to postmodernism, multiculturalism, feminism, cultural studies, social reconstructionism, and deconstruction — was often by turns extreme, dense, and intimidating. It further tended to be skeptical of Western cultural values and traditions. I think it is fair to say that many in the field of art education were ill prepared to digest these writings or to be alert to some of their potential negative consequences. I mention just a few of these.For example, although developing an appreciation for hitherto unfamiliar cultures is... (shrink)

The concept of “magic realism” raises many problems, both theoretical and historical. I first encountered it in the context of American painting in the mid-1950s; at about the same time, Angle Flores published an influential article in which the term was applied to the work of Borges;1 but Alejo Carpentier’s conception of the real maravilloso at once seemed to offer a related or alternative conception, while his own work and that of Miguel Angel Asturias seemed to demand an enlargement (...) of its application.2 Finally, with the novels of Gabriel García Márquez in the 1960s, a whole new realm of magic realism opened up whose exact relations to preceding theory and novelistic practice remained undetermined. These conceptual problems emerge most clearly when one juxtaposes the notion of magic realism with competing or overlapping terms. In the beginning, for instance, it was not clear how it was to be distinguished from that vaster category generally simply called fantastic literature; at this point, what is presumably at issue is a certain type of narrative or representation to be distinguished from realism. Carpentier, however, explicitly staged his version as a more authentic Latin American realization of what in the more reified European context took the form of surrealism: his emphasis would seem to have been on a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself—not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived . In García Márquez, finally, these two tendencies seemed to achieve a new kind of synthesis—a transfigured object world in which fantastic events are also narrated. But at this point, the focus of the conception of magic realism would appear to have shifted to what must be called an anthropological perspective: magic realism now comes to be understood as a kind of narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society, drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village or even tribal myth. Recent debates, meanwhile, have complicated all this with yet a different kind of issue: namely, the problem of the political or mystificatory value, respectively, of such texts, many of which we owe to overtly left-wing revolutionary writers .3 In spite of these terminological complexities—which might be grounds for abandoning the concept altogether—it retains a strange seductiveness which I will try to explore further, adding to the confusion with reference points drawn from the work of Jacques Lacan and from Freud’s notion of the “uncanny,” and compounding it by an argument that magic realism is to be grasped as a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism.4 1. See Angel Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” Hispania 38 : 187-92.2. See Alejo Carpentier, “Prólogo” to his novel El Reino de este mundo ; the most useful survey of the debate remains Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria, “Carpentier y el realism magico,” in Otros Mundos, otros fuegos, ed. Donald Yates, Congreso International de Literature Iberoamericana 16 , pp. 221-31.3. See Angel Rama, La Novel en America Latina , and especially Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, De Mitólogos y novelistas , in particular the discussions of Gabriel García Márques and Alejo Carpentier.4. My own general frame of reference for “postmodernism” is outlined in my “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 : 53-92. Frederic Jameson, William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, is the author of The Prison-House of Language and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. He is also a member of the editorial collective of Social Text. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis” and “Ideology and Symbolic Action”. (shrink)

The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular, possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States, though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian Proletkult of the 1930s. (...) Post-Heideggerian "deconstructivism" though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness: psychoanalysis—not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and, perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event .For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and "revolutionaries"—in all cases, jealous guardians of their academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way:1. There are political implications inherent in the act of interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning. This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning.2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to become our modern religion: the final explanation.3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an example of political delirium in avant-garde writing.Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art and About Chinese Women.Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du langage poétique. (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Introduction Towards deconstruction in architecture Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which (...) a collaboration between Jacques Derrida and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. -/- Peter Eisenman -/- Misreading… and Other Errors -/- The issue of relations between Peter Eisenman’s work and philosophy of deconstruction may be referred to his activity more than ten years preceding his direct collaboration with Jacques Derrida (in 1985) and organisation of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1988). As soon as at the stage of designing the first houses (House I-III, 1967-1970), which almost entirely inscribed in formalistic aesthetics of Modernism, the architect analysed the problem of architecture dependence on its assumptions. All his later designs may be treated as consequence of this initial interest in relations between practice and theory, and at the same time as an introduction to manipulations later on led at the level of metaphysics of architecture. Beginning with the issue of presence, considered in comments to House VI (1972), the number of ideas having their analogies in philosophy of deconstruction increased. The text entitled The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End (1984), in which Eisenman criticised questions of representation in architecture, its delusive strive for truth and comparably unattainable attempts at ultimate definition of elementary rules, should be acclaimed the breaking point. This attitude was extended by numerous strategies disturbing architecture rules defined at metaphysical level in an essay Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: an Architecture of Absence (1986). The issue of Eisenman’s passage from formalism to deconstruction has already been much discussed in the literature (Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Patin among others), still it should be mentioned that the threads similar to Derrida’s concept included in Eisenman’s writing reveal untranslatability of architecture and philosophy. -/- Choral Works or Separate tricks -/- In 1985-1986 a series of seven disputes between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman took place. The pretext for them were designs concerning Parc de la Villette in Paris. The situation of many months of collaboration between a notable philosopher of the second half of the 20th c. and an architect that already had a huge theoretical oeuvre, ended up with a publication of a large volume entitled Chora L Works and it became at the same time a vast study area for historians of contemporary architecture and philosophers. Derrida’s contribution to concept works were his considerations over the idea of chôra, the properties related to this concept were about to be reflected in shapes of the park. Therefore, Chora L Works became an example of the abilities of contemporary art, both in its capability of translation from philosophical ideas to artistic forms and its resistance to tradition of representing in architecture some phenomena and values originating outside this discipline. In the final period of their collaboration both interlocutors started to polemicise with each other more decidedly, what became a separate part of their thought exchange. The exchange of letters between Derrida and Eisenman at the turn of 1989 ended up the period of their direct contacts, nevertheless, at this time precisely a large group of experts in issues of deconstruction joined the discussion and extended the revealed in the former dispute problems into more than ten years of further considerations and publications. Except for a long text by Jeffrey Kipnis, who had participated in the meetings of the philosopher and the architect, there appeared also comments of researchers of artistic theories (K. Michael Hays, Thomas Patin), philosophers (Andrew Benjamin), and even experts in Greek literature (Maria Theodorou or Ann Bergren). Following these debates a contemporary reflection on architecture has saturated with indeed numerous concepts originating in philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Architecture which imitates mute philosophy -/- The series of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman meetings, which took place in the period of 1985-1987, induced many authors to make comments. Some of them (Jeffrey Kipnis, Ann Bergren, Maria Theodorou) developed the subject of chôra which was introduced to the discussion by Derrida. The problem that was about to be solved was the question of tying up the concept of chôra with architecture, including Eisenman’s architecture and the series of meetings within frames of Chora L Works project. Kipnis on this occasion paid attention to chôra and its character of anachronia which infects any being created within chôra. In other words any event has its counterpart (analogon) in another, earlier event. He demonstrated the similarity of structure of many events and statements from the times of Derrida and Eisenman’s meetings to the almost identical behaviour of figures in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The loss of beginning present in this phenomenon was appropriate to both features of chôra and the effects of typical analyses of philosophy of deconstruction. Bergren’s analyses focused on accentuating gender of chôra, which, according to this author, had been neglected hitherto in discussions. She collated chôra descriptions with characteristics of women in myths, early Greek epic and philosophy and she arrived at a conclusion that chôra has features of a single woman and a married one at the same time. And yet Theodorou’s studies showed that in the Homeric epics chôra is not treated as an idea but is related with single things and events. The other part of the comments (represented by Andrew Benjamin and K. Michael Hays’ utterances) concerns Eisenman’s attitude to tradition which was treated as a variety of iteration understood philosophically. Benjamin commenced his considerations at the point of closeness between a definition of tradition and a concept of chôra understood as perpetuation (placement). A problematic issue was for him Eisenman’s complex relation to tradition based on its contest and affirmation at the same time. Overcoming the simple subordination to tradition – according to Benjamin – was based on awareness of the role of repetition in culture not known before. Hays made an attempt to explain the pleasure and torment of repetition with the support of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes’ concepts. According to Hays repetitions are attempts of a single being to a certain primal state perceived as free of any tension. In a similar way Rosalind Krauss explained a motif of a grate present in Modernistic art and also exceptionally frequent in Eisenman’s work. -/- Annex Architecture is still writing Balzac novels. Peter Eisenman and literature -/- Architecture’s approach to writing, script or literature, present within Peter Eisenman’s work, is an exceptional phenomenon, furthermore a complex one. The article considers four possible relations. The first one relates to Eisenman’s characteristics as a person extremely gifted with the ability to wordplay, which very ‘play’ reveals skills to create architectural images. In the second approach the attention has been paid to Eisenman’s interests – in the first period of his oeuvre – in linguistic works by Noam Chomsky and his transformational-generative grammar. The third kind of relations applied to overcoming the need for autonomy of architecture (and of modernist aesthetics at the same time) and renew interests in questions of meaning in architecture. The fourth sort of relations occurred when Eisenman started to create reflections of historic or literary narrations in architecture – ‘stone stories’ and architectural fictions of their kind. -/- Bernard Tschumi -/- From perversion to deconstruction In Bernard Tschumi’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s we can find a transposition of important threads of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s works. The analysis of the architect’s writings also shows roots in Phillippe Sollers, Michel Foucault and Denis Hollier’s works. The analysis of borrowed elements from the beginnings of Tschumi’s theoretical activity may be helpful in explaining the contents of his later writings motre inspired by philosophy of deconstruction. The set of his earliest views was inspired by Marxism, Neo Marxism and French Structuralism, mainly by the writings of Henri Levebre and Guy Debord. From the thought of Levebre Tschumi took interest for city as not only a question of urbanistics but also a political issue. From Debord’s concepts he borrowed a conviction about the role of situational violation for changes in the society structure. Some of these beliefs were preserved in his own concepts of architecture as an event. From this period derived also his will to change conservative elements of social structure not by means of political revolution but of theoretical and creative activity. Tschumi acknowledged that the effective way of the proceedings towards achieving his aims would be accepting the role of both a critical intellectualist and architecture expert who would not hide away his left-wing orientation. The speculations defined by the architect as ‘revolting analyses’ were about to characterise contradictions which tear the society apart, penetrate architecture and constitute the basis of culture. Spreading away of the conscience of false assumptions hidden away in various disciplines could have weakened cohesion of a conservative society and influence the will to change among the elites. This way the beginnings of political revolution were rooted in philosophy of architecture. In 1977 Tschumi published his text entitled The Pleasure of Architecture inspired by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, it also included some concepts derived from Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. First of all the author used Barthes’s concept which made an assumption that literary activity is pervaded by the spirit of resistance towards social rules, and Tschudi transferred this remark onto architecture. From the ideas of Bataille, acquainted via Holier’s work, he derived his belief that two concepts of space, a conceptual one (defined as Pyramid) and a sensual one (defined as Labirynth), not losing their distinct features, they join in the concept of experienced space which exceeds contradictions. The exceeding itself was defined as the basic rule of architecture and it was referred to situations in which architecture not only negates social needs, but also disavows its own tradition. Crossing the borders applies not only to political issues or permanent rules of the very discipline but also interfering with other fields (especially literature and film). The fact that architecture is associated with organising events turned Tschumi’s attention to questions of violence that result from upsetting architectural order of a given building by its users and the one hand, and on the other from forcing the users to specific acts imposed by this very order. The analysis of the concepts used by Tschumi in his early writings indicates that they are close to definitions that would occur in his reflection in the following years influenced by philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Approaching deconstruction Tschumi in his theories developed in the 1980s presumed that the current social world had undergone a deep process of decay, and the reaction against which ought to be based on ordering-up actions, and also preserving the main outline of disintegration of the whole and its elements in the state of conflict. The statements concerning the nature of the contemporary to Tschumi social relations were applied by him to the world of architecture, this led him to coming up with designing strategies that took into consideration the destabilised character of conditions in which works of architecture were created. New ways of conduct invented by Tschumi drew their inspiration from literature and research on literature, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, structuralism and post structuralism, and eventually also deconstruction philosophy. The proposed methods were opposed by their author both to functionalism continuity trends and postmodern architecture. Tschumi’s proposals contradicted any forms of conservatism or traditionalism in political sphere as well as in reference to tendencies in architecture. They were not simple contradictions of social or architectural rules, they intrude them from the inside, weaken or escalate the already existing incongruities, they move the boundaries between the areas. Revolutionary illusions about the possibility of radical changes were replaced with strategies which completed, tainted or test former rules in the series of formal games of permutation and combination. Quite different from avant-garde formalism Tschumi’s games were not about maintaining the autonomy of a given area, but on the contrary – polluting it with other areas’ influences. Tschumi enjoyed demonstrating illusions of architecture concerning simple relations between form and function, or between form and meaning. Making use of Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s research he introduced a category of “madness” into architecture allowing an observation that the recognised norms are nothing but merely ones of many possible principles of behaviour, and their recognised status resulted from unjustified hindering innovativeness which is crucial for architecture. To reborn architecture’s capability of changing Tschumi also made use of Barthes’s discoveries concerning rules of narration and works by writers who applied in their writing knowledge on linguistics. Making a work’s author unclear by various mechanical transformations of its elements was however apparent only, and formal rigours imposed on the process of designing liberated possibilities difficult to obtain in more traditional creative action. Another mode of acting introduced by Tschumi was combining his work of elements deriving from outside architecture; joining space records with notation of motion and events accompanying architectural objects among others. These architectural and extra-architectural elements were not unified, on the contrary their heterogenous and conflictual character was stressed. This is how shock, anxiety and instability, typical for live in great metropolises, infiltrated architecture. Taking some ideas of deconstruction philosophy as a pattern Tschumi also took into critical consideration in his essays traditional in architecture oppositions between form and figuration, or theory and practice. By combining various inspirations he eventually worked out an idea of architectural event, which he understood as a series of actions contesting its own field, redefining its sources, principles and elements. An event, understood in this way, was not so much producing works as rather creating conditions of their production and at the same time designing the society different from a hierarchic one. -/- Park of deconstruction Among numerous philosophical strategies of deconstruction most frequently used was questioning the practice of strong opposition of two reasons. In many cases Bernard Tschumi’s writings just consider functioning of the conflict juxtaposition of the ideas of structure and ornament or theory and practice in history of architecture. Violation of traditional relations between terms of this kind, both old and modern, raised Jacques Derrida’s objections, when he was induced for the first time to co-operate with architects’ milieu. During this long lasting thought exchange the philosopher eventually acknowledged Bernard Tschumi’s arguments for reasoning the encroachment of architecture’s fundamental rules. Deconstruction applied in architecture was not a simple transposition or analogy of practices that had been applied by philosophy of deconstruction. We may even say that considering architectural terms became an important formula of deconstruction. Architecture understood in philosophical way became something beyond the practice and theory of its own discipline, a sort of metaphysics of both philosophy and architecture. The deliberate encroachment of simplicity of dividing architecture into theory and practice, for the first time became a clear aim for Tschumi in his drawings and texts entitled The Manhattan Transcripts. The contents of this series of works was a record of characteristic features of this New York district in such a way that not only objects were the subject of the record but also relations between objects, people and events. The record was about to take into consideration a conflict character of elements of this representation and at the same time to avoid applying to them the rule of mimetism. The record became a form of reflection over the very record by an increased control over the ways of representation. Architecture which was considered in the The Manhattan Transcripts was not directed to fulfill the needs of inhabitation or production, it was rather related with hitherto usually marginalised liminal situations: building ostentatiously big monuments, religious cult, war etc. Architecture operating in these relations focused also the attention on the included in it continuous tendency to overpass its own restrictions, the role of violence as its not recognised factor, or the meaning of excess and shock in its operation. Architecture moving from reason towards madness became even more visible in the design of Parisian Parc de la Villette, whose pavilions were defined as folies (in French it means both small park buildings and follies). The park was supposed to be on the one hand a reflection of traditional society disintegration while on the other it questioned basic rules of producing a work of architecture. The traditional rules of designing, based on ordering up, were replaced with the strategies of dysfunction and dissociation. In Tschumi’s opinion methods of this kind may be equivalent of what Derrida named différance. Instead of aiming at mergence, any diversity, plays or variations were strengthen. Tschumi’s texts, in which he explained his attitude, were completed by Derrida’s extent statement entitled Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture. Derrida’s article is the most significant of all his statements on architecture as a form of thinking and activity. According to the philosopher, architecture should divide space (in French defined as espacement), what enables both thinking and action – it arranges the space of an event. Tschumi’s buildings, defined as folies, in an essential way destabilise any created order, and at the same time they refresh it. Derrida’s statement suggests that architecture may become both metaphor of an order merging a language or a society but also of inner forces which deconstruct and reconstruct it. Therefore architecture is at the same time a construction, a deconstruction and a reconstruction. Parc de la Villette stands out in this system with its attempt to step beyond the scheme of an easy repetition and its heading for chances of achieving more radical otherness. -/- Conclusion Destruction as construction. Paradoxes of deconstruction in architecture -/- Scepticism about persistence and common importance of fundamental values of human culture evinced in philosophers and writers’ works as early as in Greek antiquity, nevertheless it was not expressed so strongly as in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (although originated in 1927, still influential in all later philosophy) the following states were characterised: the state of losing the ground (Abgrund), of being out of sight (Unheimlichkeit) and of being out of dwelling (Un-zuhause-sein) – as the basis of self-confidence of conscious being there (Dasein). The entire criticism of philosophy of home and dwelling draws the inspiration from this early writing of the German philosopher, it combines crisis of basic terms of metaphysics with social conditions which are dictated by living in large metropolis. The crisis of both metaphysical foundation and home appears to be similar to the situation of weakening the relations between a man and his dwelling in extensively expanding cities. Whereas philosophy, as well as many disciplines of social sciences, have diagnosed for a long time the destabilisation of fundamental ideas of Western culture and crucial changes in the ways of dwelling, architecture itself occurred to be “the last fortress of metaphysics” (J. Derrida). Among contemporary architects, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi were the ones who engaged most decidedly in the issues of critical analysis of architecture foundation and its social role. Both the architects noticed new formulas of contemporary social and individual existence, tremendously different from the entire history, and at the same time they affirmed lack of adequacy of architecture concepts to new situations. Both Eisenman and Tschumi used to describe the existing architecture as a tool for consolidation of highly integrated and hierarchised societies, and also as a discipline extremely uncoincidental with the current character of social life based on ideas of freedom and diversity. The means to transform architecture and make a factor of further social changes out of it, was a concept that accentuated revealing the inner contradictions of this discipline, and considering them in designing strategies. Eisenman’s activity, in regard of what has just been noticed, was focused on questioning the basic rules of traditionally comprehended architecture, especially the rule of purpose. The American architect noticed that the concept of architecture as fulfilment the need of location, hides away the fact that the location has to be constantly reconsidered, and hence it is overtaken by change (dislocation). Therefore new concept of architecture propounded architectural activity to translocate the concept of location – more than before – but also to change its status perpetually. Such comprehended architecture should claim, as its main purpose, the constant revision of this purpose and create itself anew permanently. Even Eisenman’s earliest designs of houses nos. I-IV broke with such values as the sense of safety, closeness and familiarity, and just on the contrary they accentuated senses of strangeness, homelessness and loss of confidence. The contradictions within architecture noticed by Tschumi referred to combination of intellectual and sensual values in architecture, when their non-appropriation was defeated by an additional condition, namely the way of experience based on pleasure of excess, marked by insanity. The features of folly were especially visible in his designs of gardens, where the order of planning was mixed with sensual experience introduced by particular elements (both the ones created by nature, and the buildings defined as folies). Parc de la Villette designed by the French architect in Paris put in question not only the common understanding of purpose in architecture but also the ideas of order and integrity, as its plan was based on the combination of independent layers with records of grids of points, various lines and planes. The architecture that collides inadequate elements with each other was supposed to be a kind of an event with no beginning and no end. The architecture treated as an event became a form of a space weakened articulation that maintains its diversity and lack of accordance of the elements building it up. The analyses of Eisenman and Tschumi’s theoretical writings indicate how much the aims of architecture have actually changed; instead of supporting social persistence, the architecture is rather intensifying contradictions, and instead of providing people with the sense of safety, it sublimes danger. From simple acts of defamiliarisation, increasing the distance to itself and enhancing the role of theory, through discomfort, anxiety, not feeling someone at home, weirdness, excess, shock and violence, architecture reached the edge of stability and uncertainty, only to make an attempt at penetrating what is impossible and unutterable, and recording what cannot become the subject of any records. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Revolutionary Christianity: The 1966 South American Lectures by John Howard Yoder, and: John Howard Yoder: Spiritual Writings by John Howard YoderJohn C. ShelleyRevolutionary Christianity: The 1966 South American Lectures John Howard Yoder. Edited by Paul Martens, Mark Thiessen Nation, Matthew Porter, and Myles Werntz eugene, or: cascade books, 2011. 193 pp. $18.00John Howard Yoder: Spiritual Writings John Howard Yoder. Selected with an Introduction by Paul (...) Martens and Jenny Howell. Modern Spiritual Masters Series maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2011. 172 pp. $20.00For more than sixteen years after his death in late 1997, John Howard Yoder has provoked, challenged, and inspired a new generation of theologians, ethicists, and pastors—including the editors of these two volumes—many of whom never met Yoder nor heard him speak. Now, just as this new generation prepares to preserve and enlarge his legacy, a series of revelations detailing Yoder’s repugnant behavior against women and against administrators of the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) in Elkhart, Indiana, compromises that legacy. It has been widely known that in 1992, after some initial resistance, Yoder submitted to a disciplining process initiated by his home congregation for inappropriate advances to women and that he had been reconciled and reunited in worship shortly before his death.1 The new allegations, which have become broadly public only since 2013, are considerably more serious and include coercive—indeed, “violent”—advances toward a number of women over three decades, including many students and others in subordinate positions. Further, Yoder abused the power of his reputation by intimidating the president and other administrators of AMBS, compelling them to keep the matter quiet as he slipped away to a more prestigious appointment at Notre Dame in 1984.2 According to some witnesses, this inappropriate behavior continued at Notre Dame. [End Page 210]These revelations have complicated the process of writing even a simple review.3 Were Yoder an astrophysicist with groundbreaking discoveries regarding dark matter, we would be disappointed with his behavior, but we would not challenge on those grounds the veracity of his discovery. With Christian ethics, the issue is more complicated, especially for someone of Yoder’s stature whose persona suggested that he was committed to and embodied, however imperfectly, what he proclaimed. Reading these volumes a second time has brought several jarring moments. For example, in both volumes, Yoder defines in almost identical language the temptation of “egocentric altruism”:The real temptation of good people like us is not the crude, the crass, and the carnal as those traits are defined in Puritanism. The real refined temptation, with which Jesus himself was tried, was that of egocentric altruism, of being oneself the incarnation of a good and righteous cause for which others are to suffer, of stating our self-justification in the form of a duty to others.(Revolutionary Christianity, 83; Essential Writings, 144)Consider also the following statement on religious liberty, which is certainly prescient in view of the current conflicts being played out in the courts: “Religious liberty is not only a necessary limitation upon the power of the state; it also marks a voluntary renunciation by the church of any capacity to coerce” (Revolutionary Christianity, 11). At the very least, then, perhaps we should read Yoder’s misdeeds as a warning: even we may be tempted by the crude and the carnal as well as by egocentric altruism; when threatened, even we may resort to coercion.The fourteen lectures in Revolutionary Christianity, published here for the first time, are organized into three sections—“The Believers Church,” “Peace,” and “Church in a Revolutionary World”—roughly the order of presentation to predominantly Mennonite and Anabaptist groups in Montevideo and Buenos Aires in May–June 1966. Written and delivered when Yoder was only thirty-eight and not yet a full-time faculty member, it is remarkable how fully they anticipate his later work. Clearly he mined them for later writings. The four lectures titled “The Believers Church” may be the best theological introduction available to the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition. Yoder’s description of the church as a community of forgiveness, discernment, grace; of the mandate to share; and of a morality of participation and community... (shrink)

Thomas Paine was an English-American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he inspired the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era rhetoric of transnational human rights. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination." Odin's Library Classics is dedicated (...) to bringing the world the best of humankind's literature from throughout the ages. Carefully selected, each work is unabridged from classic works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Camus’s Meursault and Sartrian IrresponsibilityDavid ShermanIn the wake of poststructuralism, with its glorification of the libidinal play of unaccountable, fragmented subjectivities, the concept of personal responsibility has been rehabilitated. From the French fascination with various forms of neo-Kantianism to the American interest in homey (albeit demagogic) books on the virtues, personal responsibility is regaining currency. But what, exactly, does it mean to be personally responsible? When Albert Camus (...) suggested in “Neither Victims Nor Executioners” that non-violence was the “responsible” position for intellectuals to take on the Algerian crisis, he was reproached for legalistically evading responsibility by his erstwhile friend Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, who offered up the concept of “absolute responsibility,” and viewed any attempt to obscure the nature of this ontological burden for oneself as “bad faith,” regarded Camus’s position as just such an attempt: “If you’re not victims when the government which you voted for, when the army in which your younger brothers are serving... have undertaken race murder, you are, without a shadow of a doubt, executioners.” 1 For Sartre, who tentatively advocated revolutionary violence, taking responsibility meant acknowledging that “bloodying one’s hands” is unavoidable.The concept of personal responsibility is well considered within the context of French existentialism, which made it one of its hallmarks. In this essay, however, I shall approach personal responsibility from the vantage point of its opposite, personal irresponsibility. Towards this end, I shall consider Meursault, the protagonist in Camus’s The Stranger, whom I take to be one of the most irresponsible characters in literature. The depths of Meursault’s irresponsibility can best be appreciated, fittingly enough, within Sartre’s psychoanalytic framework. [End Page 60]IIn Being and Nothingness, Sartre offers up the ontologically rooted phenomenon of bad faith, which, for present purposes, can be explicated as follows: consciousness, which is intentional (nothing more than that which it is conscious of), reflectively reconstitutes the Self, which does not exist in consciousness but as an object in the external world. There is no intrinsic Self, and the Self that does exist is perpetually being transcended. Despite this state of unremitting transcendence, however, at any point in time there are the undeniable facts of our particular existences, which (however we choose to interpret them) define the range of our possible projects. These brute facts, which are inexorable, constitute our facticity. Thus, Sartre tells us, there is a “double property of the human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcendence” (B&N, p. 98). 2 It is in a person’s approach to the relationship between these two properties, which is marked by an irresolvable tension, that bad faith arises: “Bad faith does not wish either to coordinate them or to surmount them in a synthesis. Bad faith seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences. It must affirm facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity, in such a way that at the instant when a person apprehends the one, he can find himself abruptly faced with the other” (B&N, p. 98).Sartre provides numerous illustrations of individuals who flee from either their facticity or transcendence. For example, there is the homosexual and his interlocutor, the “champion of sincerity.” The former, despite repeated homosexual encounters, refuses to draw the conclusion that he is a homosexual; instead, he sees both his past behavior and his present inclinations as part of a “restless search.” Conversely, the latter demands that the homosexual sincerely avow what he is, “a homosexual.” Both are in bad faith. The homosexual denies responsibility for all that he has done by perpetually pushing his conception of Self into the future, and thus perpetually beyond the reach of his ability to make judgments about himself—he makes a mockery of his past and present choices. The champion of sincerity, on the other hand, pushes the homosexual’s conception of Self into the past in order to make it a thing—he denies the homosexual’s (and perhaps his own) freedom to make future choices, which is what enables us to transcend what we presently are. The former flees facticity; the latter, transcendence.All persons in bad faith fall... (shrink)

My question in this paper is whether digital technologies transform humanity and make politics impossible. Digital technologies, no doubt, are revolutionary. But I argue that what they have done in the Post-Cold War era are: (1) to further contract the spaces between politicians and the people; (2) transform actors from subjects to objects, such that we may in addition to social identities, talk about digital identities; (3) relocate the public sphere from squares to ilosphere where individuals are granted enormous (...) expressive powers but at the same time become vulnerable to large scale manipulations; (4) and escalate the tools of politics. My argument will be that digital technologies in a subtle way are transforming humanity in the digital space and that this might have costly moral consequences not only in politics generally but specifically in liberal democracy. However, I will contend that this transformation of humanity does not make politics impossible; it only escalates it with troubling consequences like those we saw in the 2016 American presidential election. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes and the Last ScholasticsBlake D. DuttonRoger Ariew. Descartes and the Last Scholastics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 230. Cloth, $42.50.The attempt to understand Descartes vis-à-vis the scholastic tradition dates back to the studies of Etienne Gilson early in this century. Though Descartes saw himself as a revolutionary who would overthrow the Aristotelianism entrenched in the universities, Gilson was able to demonstrate his reliance (...) upon a variety of scholastic sources for important terminology, distinctions, and arguments which permeate his writings. Unfortunately, this line of investigation was largely ignored among Anglo-American scholars who were generally hostile to Scholasticism and uninterested in contextualizing Descartes's thought. However, since the mid-eighties there has been a distinct shift in attitude as scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the place of Scholasticism within Descartes's intellectual environment. Among these, Roger Ariew has to be counted as one of the most sophisticated, and his new book, Descartes and the Late Scholastics, marks an important contribution to the growing literature on the topic.Ariew's book is actually a collection of essays published over the last decade, including two which he co-authored with Marjorie Grene. Many of these have been substantially expanded to include fresh material and reworked so as to give the whole a greater sense of continuity. After a marvelous opening chapter in which he lays out his overall account of Descartes's attitude towards Scholasticism, Ariew presents the remaining essays in two large groups: those dealing with the immediate context of Descartes's thought and those dealing with its reception through the early part of the eighteenth century.Among the more interesting results of the first group of studies is Ariew's claim that the scholastic climate in and around Paris during Descartes's lifetime was predominately Scotistic rather than Thomistic. He shows this by looking at positions taken by a number of Parisian schoolmen on important issues which typically divided Scotists and Thomists. Ariew goes on to argue that not only was the Parisian environment Scotistic, but that Descartes aligned himself with the Scotists on many key issues in both physics (e.g., that time is independent of motion) and metaphysics (e.g., that the principle of individuation is a form). This is certainly an intriguing claim since most studies of this type have viewed Descartes in relation to Aquinas and those Jesuit thinkers who were broadly Thomistic in outlook. In bringing to light this Scotistic background, Ariew has opened up an important new line of inquiry.Other topics included in this first section are the literary and philosophical background [End Page 275] to the "new way of ideas" of which Descartes is a founder, the place of Descartes's doctrine of matter and form in seventeenth century debates over hylomorphism, and the reaction of Scholastics to the observational results of the new astronomy. What emerges in these essays is not only a highly nuanced view of Descartes's relation to Scholasticism, but an important corrective to still prevalent views of the Scholastics as reactionary and blindly opposed to developments within the new science. This last point is made with particular force in the fifth essay entitled "Scholastics and the New Astronomy." There Ariew argues that the astronomical observations of Galileo et alia were not in themselves decisive for overthrowing the Aristotelian cosmology as it had been articulated in the seventeenth century. This is because scholastic astronomers were generally accepting of such findings (e.g., sunspots) and were able to accommodate them within their own systems by making relatively minor adjustments. Although these systems ultimately proved themselves inadequate, Ariew makes a strong case that the Aristotelianism of the seventeenth century was sufficiently fluid to accommodate most of what the astronomers offered up. Thus the necessity for a radical overhaul of basic philosophical and scientific assumptions was by no means as evident as standard histories of this period would have us believe.The second section of the book is dedicated to debates over Cartesianism and its fate in the generations immediately following Descartes's death. Here Ariew provides a wealth of detail about various condemnations of Cartesianism, a comparative study of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 142-154 [Access article in PDF] Critical Discussions The Fortunes of Avant-Garde Poetry Mary Anne O'Neil Invisible Fences. Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature, by Steven Monte; xii & 298 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, $50.00. Modern Visual Poetry, by Willard Bohn; 321 pp. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000, $47.00. The situation of French poetry at the (...) turn of the twenty-first century is far different from what it was during the last fin de siècle. In 1900, poetry was a booming art, and France was home to numerous poets of varied inspiration and expression. The religious verse of Claudel and Péguy shared the attention of the reading public with the philosophical poetry of Valéry and the futuristic celebrations of Paris and modern life found in Apollinaire's Alcools and Calligrammes. Long poems, short poems, poems written in standard verse, free verse, prose, and even published as drawings, suggested that the golden age of poetry begun in the early nineteenth century by the Romantics and continued after 1850 by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, would not soon come to an end. This indeed proved to be the case, for the heirs of the Symbolist tradition of the first decade of the twentieth century were soon followed by the Surrealist revolutionaries of the 1920s and 1930s, many of whom directed their talents to the composition of political verse at the time of the Second World War. Political poetry by and large disappeared from France after 1950, only to be [End Page 142] succeeded over the next two decades by two very different types of verse. On the one hand, writers like St. John Perse and Pierre Jean Jouve produced difficult works whose appeal was limited to a sophisticated audience, while lyricists, such as Jacques Prévert and even the songwriter Georges Brassens, made poetry more accessible to the general public, often through popular songs. The fact that, during the days of May 1968, students scrawled verses of the Surrealist-Communist poet Paul Eluard on the walls of the Sorbonne to encourage efforts to bring down the social order attests to the power exerted by poetry on the intellectual life of France well into the second half of the twentieth century. Such, however, is no longer the case today. There are only two well-known living French poets, Francis Ponge and Yves Bonnefoy. While reviews dedicated to original poetry do still exist, especially in the south of France where the poetic arm of the French Resistance was most active in the 1940s, poetry attracts many fewer readers--and fewer writers--than it did even fifty years ago.Such a radical change merits some reflection. What has happened to French poetry since the mid-twentieth century? In a sense, all good things must come to an end sometime, and a century and a half of inventiveness and poetic energy may simply have run its natural course. French publishing houses, well aware that prose sells better than verse, have done little to encourage young poets. However, certain trends in the subject matter and form of contemporary French poetry have probably contributed to the current lack of interest. Since the end of the Second World War, French poets have concerned themselves almost uniquely with everyday life--common objects, geographical locales, and ordinary people. This obsession with the ordinary has produced some excellent poetry, especially René Char's evocations of Provençal landscapes and Yves Bonnefoy's treatments of childhood. Yet, this concentration on everyday life has severed poetry from the traditional subjects that have sustained it ever since classical antiquity, such as the celebration of heroic figures and heroic deeds, philosophical and religious inquiry, love, loss, prophetic vision. This very narrow range of subject risks consigning poetry to the status of a minor art. At the turn of the twenty-first century, French poetry also finds itself at the end of a very long period of formal experimentation that began in the second half of the nineteenth century and which includes... (shrink)

The social thought of Castoriadis and Lefort address Old World constellations. Yet both are positioned in a critical relationship to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and pose questions about power, the political and citizenship relevant to different civilizational settings. Two political philosophies that emerged in the era of revolutionary critique are examined in this paper alongside Castoriadis and Lefort. Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of republic and empire and Simon Bolivar’s creed of independence were American visions that connected with the political (...) imaginary. Each set down traditions open to interpretation and mythologisation. Both invoked an older rivalry of two images of the New World, as American or as Colombian, which was really a rivalry of Spanish and British Empires and their civilizational influences. Where earlier republican visions developed at the cusp of virtue and interest cultures had posed a particular range of questions about democracy, civic constitution and independence, American states now contained democratic and authoritarian potential. Even though Castoriadis and Lefort did not make these American contexts the centre of their work, each conceive the political and politics in ways that are relevant to American modernities. A key argument put in this paper with respect to Castoriadis and Lefort is that Castoriadis’s conception of creation is more salient to the republican revolutions more generally, while Lefort’s notion of political imaginary finds a strong case in the North American revolution. (shrink)

In this, his premiere work, Cornel West provides readers with a new understanding of the African American experience based largely on his own political and cultural perspectives borne out of his own life's experiences. He challenges African Americans to consider the incorporation of Marxism into their theological perspectives, thereby adopting the mindset that it is class more so than race that renders one powerless in America. Armed with a new introduction by the author, this Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Prophesy (...) Deliverance! is a must have. (shrink)

The past decades have seen a growing “philosophical” interest in a number of authors, but strangely enough Saramago’s oeuvre has been left somewhat aside. This volume aims at filling this gap by providing a diverse range of philosophical perspectives and expositions on Saramago’s work. The chapters explore some possible issues arising from his works: from his use of Plato’s allegory of the cave to his re-readings of Biblical stories; from his critique and “reinvention” of philosophy of history to his allegorical (...) exploration of alternative histories; from his humorous approach to our being-towards-death to the revolutionary political charge of his fiction. The essays here confront Saramago’s fiction with concepts, theories, and suggestions belonging to various philosophical traditions and philosophers including Plato, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Patočka, Derrida, Agamben, and Žižek. (shrink)

In the Netherlands, the poet Herman Gorter is mostly known as the author of the neo-romantic poem May and the “sensitivistic” Poems, but internationally he became famous as a propagandist of radical Marxism: the author of influential brochures and of an “open letter” to comrade W.I. Lenin in 1920. During the 1890s, Gorter became increasingly dissatisfied with his poetry, considering it as ego-centric, disinterested and “bourgeois”, unconnected with what was happening in the real world. He wanted to put his poetry (...) on a scientific footing, notably by endorsing a dialectical materialist worldview. In the communist society he envisioned, science would become poetry and poetry would become science. In his opus magnum Pan, two terms are rather prominent, namely heelal and kristal. These signifiers not only reflect important themes, but also two friendships which began around 1900, namely with prominent astronomer and marxist Anton Pannekoek and with Ada Prins, the first woman in the Netherlands who acquired a PhD in chemistry, specialised in liquid crystal research. Whereas Ada Prins is mostly remembered as one of Gorter’s secret lovers, she was first and foremost his educated guide into the complex and enigmatic world of twentieth-century chemistry research. Liquid crystal chemistry became an important source of inspiration for Gorter’s work and the main objective of this paper is to demonstrate her influence on Gorter’s Pan as a scientific poem After presenting the two heroes of this paper, and their work in poetry and chemistry respectively, I will analyse the role of liquid crystals in Herman Gorter’s Pan, highlighting important connections with Ada Prins’ research into liquid crystal chemistry. (shrink)

In the Netherlands, the poet Herman Gorter is mostly known as the author of the neo-romantic poem May and the “sensitivistic” Poems, but internationally he became famous as a propagandist of radical Marxism: the author of influential brochures and of an “open letter” to comrade W.I. Lenin in 1920. During the 1890s, Gorter became increasingly dissatisfied with his poetry, considering it as ego-centric, disinterested and “bourgeois”, unconnected with what was happening in the real world. He wanted to put his poetry (...) on a scientific footing, notably by endorsing a dialectical materialist worldview. In the communist society he envisioned, science would become poetry and poetry would become science. In his opus magnum Pan, two terms are rather prominent, namely heelal and kristal. These signifiers not only reflect important themes, but also two friendships which began around 1900, namely with prominent astronomer and marxist Anton Pannekoek and with Ada Prins, the first woman in the Netherlands who acquired a PhD in chemistry, specialised in liquid crystal research. Whereas Ada Prins is mostly remembered as one of Gorter’s secret lovers, she was first and foremost his educated guide into the complex and enigmatic world of twentieth-century chemistry research. Liquid crystal chemistry became an important source of inspiration for Gorter’s work and the main objective of this paper is to demonstrate her influence on Gorter’s Pan as a scientific poem After presenting the two heroes of this paper, and their work in poetry and chemistry respectively, I will analyse the role of liquid crystals in Herman Gorter’s Pan, highlighting important connections with Ada Prins’ research into liquid crystal chemistry. (shrink)

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes (...) extended discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

This collection of essays intends to challenge conventional notions of what constitutes an American national literature. The new reading of Hegel in recent philosophy and critical theory subjects history and language to a thorough critique. Yet the connection of Hegel to American discourse has largely gone unexplored, and literary theorists have scarcely begun to interrogate the priorities of Hegelianism implicit in American literary history. The essays collected in Theorizing American Literature thus organize their arguments around the (...) necessity to rethink the process of historicizing American literature and to redefine the terms of discussion of some of its most familiar authors. (shrink)

Examining the literature of slavery and race before the Civil War, Maurice Lee demonstrates for the first time exactly how the slavery crisis became a crisis of philosophy that exposed the breakdown of national consensus and the limits of rational authority. Poe, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Emerson were among the antebellum authors who tried - and failed - to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict. Unable to mediate the slavery controversy as the nation moved toward war, their writings form (...) an uneasy transition between the confident rationalism of the American Enlightenment and the more skeptical thought of the pragmatists. Lee draws on antebellum moral philosophy, political theory, and metaphysics, bringing a fresh perspective to the literature of slavery - one that synthesizes cultural studies and intellectual history to argue that romantic, sentimental, and black Atlantic writers all struggled with modernity when facing the slavery crisis. (shrink)

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the (...) creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography. (shrink)

The title of Andy Clark's book is, among other things, a reference to one of the central terms in Martin Heidegger's early work: "Dasein" (being there) is the word that Heidegger uses to refer to beings like ourselves. Clark is no Heidegger scholar, but the reference is deliberate; among the predecessors to his book he lists not only Heidegger himself, but also the American Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus and the French Heideggerean phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This triumvirate has played an (...) increasingly important role in recent years among the "alternative" cognitive science set, owing largely to the influence of Dreyfus's 1979 book What Computers Can't Do (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979), which enlisted Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontean arguments in the fight against classical symbolic processing approaches to artificial intelligence. Clark's book fits squarely in this "alternative" tradition, and it is an important contribution to the existing literature. It surveys a large array of results in cognitive scientifically oriented fields ranging from robotics to developmental psychology, and it argues convincingly that these results should encourage us to embrace a radical new research paradigm in the cognitive sciences. The central claim is that mainstream cognitive scientists should, like their more revolutionary colleagues, learn to substitute for "the disembodied, atemporal intellectualist vision of mind ... the image of mind as a controller of embodied action" (p. 7). As a clear and brightly written account of this alternative movement in cognitive science, and perhaps even as a kind of mission statement for the new paradigm, Clark's book is one of the finest I have read. It is limited, however, by the fact that the interesting and well-described empirical work that forms the center of his presentation does not always provide sufficient resources for addressing the equally important philosophical problems lurking. (shrink)

Although not exactly continuous, the Native American challenge to the canon, as I have tried to show, has been of comparatively long standing. Nonetheless, inasmuch as Native American literary production and Euramerican writing influenced by it have only barely begun to enter the courses in and the anthologies of general American literature, that challenge cannot be said to have been effective as yet. No doubt it will take more time for poets and teachers to recognize what Native (...) American literatures aboriginally were and, to some extent, still are; to recognize when and if the influence of these literatures is present in work by Native and non-Native writers. It is only since the 1950s and 1960s that philological and structural work has begun to make this recognition possible in any case.It is only more recently still that an adequately sophisticated criticism for these literatures has begun to develop, with the publication of Abraham Chapman’s basic and eclectic collection of essays, Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations ; Karl Kroeber’s uneven but valuable introduction to the subject, Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations ; and Hymes’ “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics , a collection of Hymes’ seminal and indispensable work. The broadest and most sophisticated collection of essays—gathering work by Hymes, Tedlock, Toelken, Kroeber, and others—has only just appeared: Smooting the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature is edited by Brian Swann, a poet and translator of Mative American song.61 These developments are encouraging for Native American literatures. As American society continues to move away from anthropocentrism and textual authority, the Native tradition may for the first time effectively assert its claim upon the canon of American literature. 61. For his translations, see, for example, Swann’s Song of the Sky: Versions of Native American Songs and Poems . Swann works from texts, not performances, from English language versions, not transcriptions of Native languages; as a result, he has made a point of insisting, “These poems of mine are not translations” but instead “versions” of Native American poetry. Although he has given up specific claims to authenticity, Swann has nonetheless shown how much can be done by the non-Native poet and scholar responding to the Native tradition as a powerful source. Arnold Krupat is a member of the literature faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the coeditor of the University of Nebraska Press’ Native American Autobiography Series and is currently completing an anthology of Native American autobiographies, Indian Lives. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “An Approach to Native American Texts,” appeared in the December 1982 issue. (shrink)

Robert Abrams argues that new concepts of space and landscape emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, marking a linguistic and interpretative limit to American expansion. Abrams supports the radical elements of antebellum writing, where writers from Hawthorne to Rebecca Harding Davis disputed the naturalizing discourses of mid-nineteenth century society. Whereas previous critics find in antebellum writing a desire to convert chaos into an affirmative, liberal agenda, Abrams contends that authors of the 1840s and 50s deconstructed more than they constructed.

This Guide to the archive presents political theory’s engagement with American literature via a focus on the tension between the real and the imaginative as a source for politics.