Being Inside and Outside Social Relations

Abstract

It is a special responsibility to incur individual readings of one’s work from colleagues. I hope the following line of thought does them justice.Nay Rather, an essay by Anne Carson (a translator and poet as well as a classical scholar), begins with an account of the trial of Joan of Arc. Caught in battle against the English and their Burgundian allies on 23 May 1430, a year after she had assisted a French army in lifting the English siege of Orleans, Joan of Arc was put on trial for heresy. The trial lasted from January to May 1431, and Joan was burnt at the stake on 30 May, aged nineteen. In recounting this history, Carson explains that she is particularly interested in the way in which, as she puts it, Joan was ‘distant’ from her own words. Carson (2014: 8) elaborates. Joan of Arc’s guidance, military and moral came from a source that she called ‘voices’. She began to hear them at the age of twelve, and they commanded her style of dress, her beliefs and the revolutionary politics of her action. At her trial, her English ecclesiastical prosecutors wanted to know her voices, for Joan to name and describe them in ways in which they might understand: in terms of recognised religious imagery and emotions, and in a conventional narrative that might then be subjected to mechanisms of theological proof.