Pub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/10418385-8955843
L. Parisi, W. Morgan
Abstract:This interview with the digital media theorist Luciana Parisi opens with the hypothesis that cybernetics is not merely the name for that postwar metascience of command and control. For Parisi, cybernetics names a “historical reconfiguration of metaphysics on behalf of technics.” This interview asks about the meaning and consequences of this hypothesis but steers away from the all-too-easy poiesis-as-panacea solution to the computational quagmire. Instead, this interview descends into the computational medium, into the specificity of its logic, asking what it might mean not merely to live in a cyberneticized world but to actively participate and believe in such a world. Parisi’s response puts to philosophy an important task: not to seek the accommodations of an expanding concept of the human within a machinic world but to think with the logic of the ascendant cybernetic metaphysics. For Parisi, a necessary move herein is to negotiate the reality of the algorithm’s syntactic operations, their performativity, a move that for her implies a certain form of belief. In tracking this form of belief across disciplines, this interview broaches questions of scalability, race and colonialism, the nonneutrality of technoscience, and the potential of computational aesthetics. Finally, the interview gestures toward Parisi’s future work, because, as she reminds us, we cannot go back; there are questions emerging from within machines that are eager to emerge and are waiting for us to think them.
{"title":"What Is (Machine) Philosophy?","authors":"L. Parisi, W. Morgan","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8955843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8955843","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This interview with the digital media theorist Luciana Parisi opens with the hypothesis that cybernetics is not merely the name for that postwar metascience of command and control. For Parisi, cybernetics names a “historical reconfiguration of metaphysics on behalf of technics.” This interview asks about the meaning and consequences of this hypothesis but steers away from the all-too-easy poiesis-as-panacea solution to the computational quagmire. Instead, this interview descends into the computational medium, into the specificity of its logic, asking what it might mean not merely to live in a cyberneticized world but to actively participate and believe in such a world. Parisi’s response puts to philosophy an important task: not to seek the accommodations of an expanding concept of the human within a machinic world but to think with the logic of the ascendant cybernetic metaphysics. For Parisi, a necessary move herein is to negotiate the reality of the algorithm’s syntactic operations, their performativity, a move that for her implies a certain form of belief. In tracking this form of belief across disciplines, this interview broaches questions of scalability, race and colonialism, the nonneutrality of technoscience, and the potential of computational aesthetics. Finally, the interview gestures toward Parisi’s future work, because, as she reminds us, we cannot go back; there are questions emerging from within machines that are eager to emerge and are waiting for us to think them.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"23 54","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132545729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/10418385-8955829
C. Albrecht, Wendy H. Chun, L. Kurgan
Abstract:In a 1954 essay Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton coined the term homophily to describe similarity-based friendship. They based their findings on friendship patterns among neighbors in a biracial housing project in the United States, using a combined quantitative and qualitative, empirical and speculative analysis of social processes. Since then homophily has become a guiding principle for network science: it is simply presumed that similarity breeds connection. But the unpublished study by Merton, Patricia S. West, and Marie Jahoda, which grounds Lazarsfeld and Merton’s analysis, and the Merton and Bureau of Applied Social Research’s archive reveal a more complex picture. This article engages with the data traces in the archive to reimagine what enabled the residents of the studied housing project to live in difference, as neighbors. The reanimation of this archive reveals the often counterintuitive characteristic of our imagined networks: they are about removal, not addition. It also opens up new imagined possibilities for a digital future beyond the hatred of the different and online echo chambers.
{"title":"Living In/difference; or, How to Imagine Ambivalent Networks","authors":"C. Albrecht, Wendy H. Chun, L. Kurgan","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8955829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8955829","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In a 1954 essay Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton coined the term homophily to describe similarity-based friendship. They based their findings on friendship patterns among neighbors in a biracial housing project in the United States, using a combined quantitative and qualitative, empirical and speculative analysis of social processes. Since then homophily has become a guiding principle for network science: it is simply presumed that similarity breeds connection. But the unpublished study by Merton, Patricia S. West, and Marie Jahoda, which grounds Lazarsfeld and Merton’s analysis, and the Merton and Bureau of Applied Social Research’s archive reveal a more complex picture. This article engages with the data traces in the archive to reimagine what enabled the residents of the studied housing project to live in difference, as neighbors. The reanimation of this archive reveals the often counterintuitive characteristic of our imagined networks: they are about removal, not addition. It also opens up new imagined possibilities for a digital future beyond the hatred of the different and online echo chambers.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125725410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/10418385-8742972
Mohamad Amer Meziane
Abstract:This essay examines the effects of the critique of religion on the critique of capital and how the former confines the latter. It asks: What remains of the concepts of alienation or fetishism if they all stem from an anthropology of religion that seems to be criticized? If religion ceases to refer to an anthropological essence and is criticized as a European colonial concept, then what happens to the critique of capital? It argues that what Marx considers the condition for critique seems to be the blind spot ofWestern Marxism. Without a critical analysis of how the concept of religion is constructed and how religion is thus described as a human invention, Marxism cannot know itself. If Marx is a "critic of the critique of religion," this gesture must apply to Marx as well as to Marxism itself. The critique of capitalism might need an alternative foundation if the anthropological concept of religion that supported it collapses. It is therefore impossible to maintain the critique of capital as it is while refusing the critique of religion that lies at its foundation.
{"title":"How the Critique of Heaven Confines the Critique of the Earth","authors":"Mohamad Amer Meziane","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8742972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8742972","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the effects of the critique of religion on the critique of capital and how the former confines the latter. It asks: What remains of the concepts of alienation or fetishism if they all stem from an anthropology of religion that seems to be criticized? If religion ceases to refer to an anthropological essence and is criticized as a European colonial concept, then what happens to the critique of capital? It argues that what Marx considers the condition for critique seems to be the blind spot ofWestern Marxism. Without a critical analysis of how the concept of religion is constructed and how religion is thus described as a human invention, Marxism cannot know itself. If Marx is a \"critic of the critique of religion,\" this gesture must apply to Marx as well as to Marxism itself. The critique of capitalism might need an alternative foundation if the anthropological concept of religion that supported it collapses. It is therefore impossible to maintain the critique of capital as it is while refusing the critique of religion that lies at its foundation.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129918995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/10418385-8743016
C. Mcgowan
Abstract:This article argues that Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008) represents an unexpected but compelling mutation of the genre of postindustrial labor film. Hunger depicts the protests of Irish republican prisoners inside the Maze Prison that culminated in the 1981 Irish hunger strike. At the same time, the film develops an extended representation of the labor of the prison workers who beat, humiliate, care for, and counsel the prisoners throughout the protests. By combining and reworking the genres of labor film, prison film, and Irish Troubles film, Hunger imagines the prison as a microcosm of a deindustrialized Northern Irish economy where labor has left the factory and become conjoined to the disciplinary power of the state, either as police work or as care work. In this way, Hunger attends to the "spirit" of what Lenin called the "labor aristocracy," here reduced to the work of maintaining the very boundary between itself and those excluded from it. McQueen's attention to the body and to the affective dimensions of labor and struggle, the article argues, allows Hunger to achieve a uniquely committed, totalizing representation of the political economy of Northern Ireland.
{"title":"Workers Entering the Prison: Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008) as Imperial Labor Film","authors":"C. Mcgowan","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8743016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8743016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008) represents an unexpected but compelling mutation of the genre of postindustrial labor film. Hunger depicts the protests of Irish republican prisoners inside the Maze Prison that culminated in the 1981 Irish hunger strike. At the same time, the film develops an extended representation of the labor of the prison workers who beat, humiliate, care for, and counsel the prisoners throughout the protests. By combining and reworking the genres of labor film, prison film, and Irish Troubles film, Hunger imagines the prison as a microcosm of a deindustrialized Northern Irish economy where labor has left the factory and become conjoined to the disciplinary power of the state, either as police work or as care work. In this way, Hunger attends to the \"spirit\" of what Lenin called the \"labor aristocracy,\" here reduced to the work of maintaining the very boundary between itself and those excluded from it. McQueen's attention to the body and to the affective dimensions of labor and struggle, the article argues, allows Hunger to achieve a uniquely committed, totalizing representation of the political economy of Northern Ireland.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133858346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/10418385-8743005
A. Feuerstein
Abstract:This essay analyzes two late Victorian texts by white women colonists in South Africa—F. Clinton Parry's children's book African Pets (1880) and Annie Martin's memoir Home Life on an Ostrich Farm (1890)—to nuance understandings of animality as racialization. By reading representations of colonial pet-keeping, the essay shows how the racializing tendencies of Western humanism—especially within slavery and colonialism—manifest within gendered animalhuman relationships and help construct both Blackness and whiteness. It focuses on pet-keeping in the colonies to explore understandings of animal-human relationships within the Victorian empire and thus revises Achille Mbembe's taxonomy of colonial animality. Moving beyond comparison and the tendency to group multiple kinds of dehumanizing practices within slavery and colonialism under the term animalization, the essay suggests that the assemblage is a more productive way to read the many layers of dehumanization taking place within colonial contexts. By analyzing constructions of Blackness, whiteness, and the animal together, it argues that within the animalization and dehumanization projected from the white colonist, we can move beyond reading only for anti-Blackness and locate significant moments of Black fugitivity, wherein Blackness escapes the racializing logics of Western humanism.
摘要:本文分析了两篇维多利亚晚期南非白人女性殖民者的文本。克林顿·帕里(Clinton Parry)的儿童读物《非洲宠物》(1880)和安妮·马丁(Annie Martin)的回忆录《鸵鸟农场的家庭生活》(1890)——对动物作为种族化的细微理解。通过阅读殖民时期饲养宠物的表现，本文展示了西方人道主义的种族化倾向——特别是在奴隶制和殖民主义下——如何在两性动物与人类关系中表现出来，并有助于构建黑人和白人。它关注于殖民地的宠物饲养，以探索对维多利亚帝国内动物与人类关系的理解，从而修订了Achille Mbembe的殖民地动物分类学。除了比较和将奴隶制和殖民主义中的多种非人性化行为归为“动物化”一词的倾向之外，本文认为，这种组合是一种更有效的方式来解读发生在殖民背景下的多层非人性化行为。通过对Blackness、white、and the animal的结构分析，认为在白人殖民者投射的动物化和非人性化中，我们可以超越仅仅为反黑性而阅读，找到黑人逃亡的重要时刻，其中Blackness逃脱了西方人文主义的种族化逻辑。
{"title":"\"South Africa Is the Land of Pet Animals\"; or, The Racializing Assemblages of Colonial Pet-Keeping","authors":"A. Feuerstein","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8743005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8743005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay analyzes two late Victorian texts by white women colonists in South Africa—F. Clinton Parry's children's book African Pets (1880) and Annie Martin's memoir Home Life on an Ostrich Farm (1890)—to nuance understandings of animality as racialization. By reading representations of colonial pet-keeping, the essay shows how the racializing tendencies of Western humanism—especially within slavery and colonialism—manifest within gendered animalhuman relationships and help construct both Blackness and whiteness. It focuses on pet-keeping in the colonies to explore understandings of animal-human relationships within the Victorian empire and thus revises Achille Mbembe's taxonomy of colonial animality. Moving beyond comparison and the tendency to group multiple kinds of dehumanizing practices within slavery and colonialism under the term animalization, the essay suggests that the assemblage is a more productive way to read the many layers of dehumanization taking place within colonial contexts. By analyzing constructions of Blackness, whiteness, and the animal together, it argues that within the animalization and dehumanization projected from the white colonist, we can move beyond reading only for anti-Blackness and locate significant moments of Black fugitivity, wherein Blackness escapes the racializing logics of Western humanism.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117179083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1215/10418385-8241890
Judith Butler
Abstract:Indefinite detention is a legal norm and practice that is increasingly acceptable throughout the world. It consists of arrest and forcible detention without a clear communication of crimes committed, and it can last indefinitely, since it deprives the detained of recourse to courts for review and release. Kafka's Trial, which brought this kind of legal nightmare into focus, proves relevant for understanding the temporal sequence by which the expectation of justice through law is confounded and negated. Over and against the expectation that a set of legal procedures sequentially followed will deliver a fair verdict, if not justice, Kafka's reordering of space and time exposes a world in which the allegation becomes punishment and the expected release becomes the renewal of detention itself. The relation between fictional and legal sequence proves salient for understanding the indefinite postponement of justice through law, exposing in the end a form of legal violence indistinguishable from criminality.
{"title":"Indefinite Detention","authors":"Judith Butler","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8241890","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8241890","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Indefinite detention is a legal norm and practice that is increasingly acceptable throughout the world. It consists of arrest and forcible detention without a clear communication of crimes committed, and it can last indefinitely, since it deprives the detained of recourse to courts for review and release. Kafka's Trial, which brought this kind of legal nightmare into focus, proves relevant for understanding the temporal sequence by which the expectation of justice through law is confounded and negated. Over and against the expectation that a set of legal procedures sequentially followed will deliver a fair verdict, if not justice, Kafka's reordering of space and time exposes a world in which the allegation becomes punishment and the expected release becomes the renewal of detention itself. The relation between fictional and legal sequence proves salient for understanding the indefinite postponement of justice through law, exposing in the end a form of legal violence indistinguishable from criminality.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128141189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1215/10418385-8241879
Keith P. Feldman
Abstract:This essay considers how the graphic arts of Leila Abdelrazaq give form to Palestine's contemporary worldliness and to the worldliness of Palestinian difference. It argues that Abdelrazaq's work illustrates the entanglement of diaspora, memory, and futurity within the interconnected structures of enclosure and expulsion.
{"title":"Carceral Entanglement in the Work of Leila Abdelrazaq","authors":"Keith P. Feldman","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8241879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8241879","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay considers how the graphic arts of Leila Abdelrazaq give form to Palestine's contemporary worldliness and to the worldliness of Palestinian difference. It argues that Abdelrazaq's work illustrates the entanglement of diaspora, memory, and futurity within the interconnected structures of enclosure and expulsion.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"66 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121014068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1215/10418385-8241934
K. Villadsen
Abstract:This essay tells the story of how Denmark transformed from a very welcoming and tolerant country to one whose prime ministers reassure its residents, "We have the strictest Alien Act possible." The approach is genealogical, following Michel Foucault, and the empirical focal point is Danish immigration policies as they evolved from the late 1960s until today. This development culminates in the emergence of the "restrictionist policy paradigm," which associates immigrants with risks like economic burdens, high unemployment levels, crimes, undemocratic attitudes, and the development of ghettos. From the perspective of the welfare project, the immigrants became "risky" as they were profiled in terms of their higher probability of developing suboptimal or dysfunctional behaviors that endanger the welfare state. The Danish experience is analyzed from a broader thesis on the welfare state as caught up between welfarist universality, industrial-capitalist expansion, and sovereign territoriality. Drawing on Foucault's work, these different logics of statehood are analyzed as evolving constellations of law, discipline, and security. Danish immigration policy mutates over time so that policies of security premised on free circulation gradually give way to discipline and legal sovereignty that block, filter, and segregate immigrants. Alongside this movement toward territorial enclosure, the discursive construction of the immigrant changes fundamentally.
{"title":"I Assure You, We Have the Strictest Alien Act Possible! The Emergence of the Concept of \"Risky Immigrants\" in Denmark","authors":"K. Villadsen","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8241934","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8241934","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay tells the story of how Denmark transformed from a very welcoming and tolerant country to one whose prime ministers reassure its residents, \"We have the strictest Alien Act possible.\" The approach is genealogical, following Michel Foucault, and the empirical focal point is Danish immigration policies as they evolved from the late 1960s until today. This development culminates in the emergence of the \"restrictionist policy paradigm,\" which associates immigrants with risks like economic burdens, high unemployment levels, crimes, undemocratic attitudes, and the development of ghettos. From the perspective of the welfare project, the immigrants became \"risky\" as they were profiled in terms of their higher probability of developing suboptimal or dysfunctional behaviors that endanger the welfare state. The Danish experience is analyzed from a broader thesis on the welfare state as caught up between welfarist universality, industrial-capitalist expansion, and sovereign territoriality. Drawing on Foucault's work, these different logics of statehood are analyzed as evolving constellations of law, discipline, and security. Danish immigration policy mutates over time so that policies of security premised on free circulation gradually give way to discipline and legal sovereignty that block, filter, and segregate immigrants. Alongside this movement toward territorial enclosure, the discursive construction of the immigrant changes fundamentally.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124636040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1215/10418385-8241912
B. Penteado
Abstract:Recent developments in literary studies that can be grouped under the umbrella term postcritique purport to restore, in our disciplinary practices, attention to affect, pleasure, and attachment, which postcritics believe the critical tradition has silenced and neglected. Postcritics depict critique as a violent hermeneutic practice of excavating a text's hidden truths. This essay claims that postcritique's understanding of critical theory is misguided and caricatural. By focusing on key thinkers of the critical tradition, particularly French philosophers, it argues that hermeneutic openness and nonmastery is a constant in many critical writings—and so is the question of pleasure. It suggests that many of postcritique's propositions, which postcritics affirm are innovative and claim critique has disavowed, have always been a recurring topic in the work of critical theorists.
{"title":"Critical (Dis)pleasure","authors":"B. Penteado","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8241912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8241912","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Recent developments in literary studies that can be grouped under the umbrella term postcritique purport to restore, in our disciplinary practices, attention to affect, pleasure, and attachment, which postcritics believe the critical tradition has silenced and neglected. Postcritics depict critique as a violent hermeneutic practice of excavating a text's hidden truths. This essay claims that postcritique's understanding of critical theory is misguided and caricatural. By focusing on key thinkers of the critical tradition, particularly French philosophers, it argues that hermeneutic openness and nonmastery is a constant in many critical writings—and so is the question of pleasure. It suggests that many of postcritique's propositions, which postcritics affirm are innovative and claim critique has disavowed, have always been a recurring topic in the work of critical theorists.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126172052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1215/10418385-8241923
W. S. Allen
Abstract:Blanchot's readings of Lautréamont are among the most important writings on this challenging author, and they are also crucial for the development of his own thinking, but they have never been discussed in depth. This essay surveys the whole range of Blanchot's writings on Lautréamont and shows how they constitute the first considered attempt within his thinking to examine the notions of the fantastic and the image in relation to the experience of metaphor. This survey not only enables a renewed understanding of the significance of Lautréamont's writings but also reveals how Blanchot transforms the Hegelian thinking of experience by way of its passage through literature.
{"title":"Blanchot and Lautréamont","authors":"W. S. Allen","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8241923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8241923","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Blanchot's readings of Lautréamont are among the most important writings on this challenging author, and they are also crucial for the development of his own thinking, but they have never been discussed in depth. This essay surveys the whole range of Blanchot's writings on Lautréamont and shows how they constitute the first considered attempt within his thinking to examine the notions of the fantastic and the image in relation to the experience of metaphor. This survey not only enables a renewed understanding of the significance of Lautréamont's writings but also reveals how Blanchot transforms the Hegelian thinking of experience by way of its passage through literature.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115557337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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