From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South (...) African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships. Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's _Still Alive_ and Marguerite Duras's _La Douleur_; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's _W_, Art Spiegelman's _Maus_, and Philippe Grimbert's _Secret_; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's _Austerlitz_, Sabine Reichel's _What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?_, and Ursula Duba's _Tales from a Child of the Enemy_. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory. Schwab concludes with a bracing look at issues of responsibility, reparation, and forgiveness across the victim/perpetrator divide. (shrink)

“I am, but I do not own myself”—this famous formula of Plessner conceives man as an excentric subject, i.e. a being who can never dominate and dispose of himself as a whole. If we add to Plessner's dictum Bloch's answer to it: “I am. But I do not own myself. Therefore we are still becoming” then we are already suggesting the anthropological space of the imaginary; because the ability to imagine something that is not, plays an essential role in this (...) subject's becoming. (shrink)

_Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis_ explores the critical relationship between psychoanalysis and the work of Derrida (_Speech and Phenomena_, _Of Grammatology_, and his later writing on autoimmunity, cruelty, war, and human rights) and Deleuze (_A Thousand Plateaus_, _Anti-Oedipus_, and more). Each essay illuminates a specific aspect of Derrida's and Deleuze's perspectives on psychoanalysis: the human-animal boundary; the child's polymorphism; the face or mouth as constitutive of ethical responsibility toward others; the connections between pain and suffering and political resistance; the role of masochism (...) in psychoanalytic thinking; the use of psychoanalytic secondary revision in theorizing film; and the political dimension of the unconscious. Placing a particular emphasis on liminal figurations of the human and challenges to discourses on free will, the essays explore shared concerns in Derrida and Deleuze with regard to history, politics, the political unconscious, and resistance. By addressing the need to overcome the split between the psychological and the political, _Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis_ illuminates the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to critical interrogations of culture and politics. (shrink)

Through readings of iconic figures such as the cannibal, the child, the alien, and the posthuman, Gabriele Schwab analyzes literary explorations at the boundaries of the human. Treating literature as a dynamic medium that "writes culture"--one that makes the abstract particular and local, and situates us within the world--Schwab pioneers a compelling approach to reading literary texts as "anthropologies of the future" that challenge habitual productions of meaning and knowledge. Schwab's study draws on anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis to (...) trace literature's profound impact on the cultural imaginary. Following a new interpretation of Derrida's and Lévi-Strauss's famous controversy over the indigenous Nambikwara, Schwab explores the vicissitudes of "traveling literature" through novels and films that fashion a cross-cultural imaginary. She also examines the intricate links between colonialism, cannibalism, melancholia, the fate of disenfranchised children under the forces of globalization, and the intertwinement of property and personhood in the neoliberal imaginary. Schwab concludes with an exploration of discourses on the posthuman, using Samuel Beckett's "The Lost Ones" and its depiction of a future lived under the conditions of minimal life. Drawing on a wide range of theories, Schwab engages the productive intersections between literary studies and anthropology, underscoring the power of literature to shape culture, subjectivity, and life. (shrink)

This article takes a moment of intercultural exchange, first reported as "The Writing Lesson" by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques and later explored by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, as the occasion for further reflection on the role played by the aesthetic in what it terms intercultural transference. Transference occurs whenever unconscious desires, fantasies or patterns of being and relating are enacted in an interpersonal or intercultural encounter, including the indirect encounters between literary or artistic objects and their recipients. It (...) emerges as a largely unconscious operation designed to bridge, close, fill or deny the inevitable gaps in knowing another person or another culture, and to manage the affects such gaps bring forth. Intercultural transference provides a framework to read "The Writing Lesson" differently and suggests a theoretical model able to account for the complex performances of intercultural transference that enter any exchange or translation between cultures. (shrink)