Starting with a recall of the overwhelming feeling, voiced by many thinkers, that the post-WWII era brought about the ‘sense of an ending’ of history as Mitsein (being-in-common), the essay explores the renewed necessity to re-learn to be together in the wake of the worst modern pandemic by appealing to Jean-Luc Nancy’s imagination of a community without community. Nancy’s plea for a singular togetherness will be re-examined in relation to his view that COVID-19 makes us equal and ‘communizes’ us, including in our respective isolations, which we attempt to re-interpret within the critical framework, in memory studies, of what James E. Young called ‘collected memory’. Inflecting Maurice Halbwachs’s original ‘collective memory’ to allow for the many discrete, fragmented memories of disparate individuals united in common moments of remembrance, ‘collected memory’ will be seen as a hyphenated process of ‘re-membering’, a poetic piecing together of disjointed, scattered members and isolated communities gathered in virtual unison through their respective losses. This research is supported by The Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning.
{"title":"Re-Membering – A Plea for Togetherness","authors":"A. Ionescu, Laurent Milesi","doi":"10.3366/olr.2022.0380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2022.0380","url":null,"abstract":"Starting with a recall of the overwhelming feeling, voiced by many thinkers, that the post-WWII era brought about the ‘sense of an ending’ of history as Mitsein (being-in-common), the essay explores the renewed necessity to re-learn to be together in the wake of the worst modern pandemic by appealing to Jean-Luc Nancy’s imagination of a community without community. Nancy’s plea for a singular togetherness will be re-examined in relation to his view that COVID-19 makes us equal and ‘communizes’ us, including in our respective isolations, which we attempt to re-interpret within the critical framework, in memory studies, of what James E. Young called ‘collected memory’. Inflecting Maurice Halbwachs’s original ‘collective memory’ to allow for the many discrete, fragmented memories of disparate individuals united in common moments of remembrance, ‘collected memory’ will be seen as a hyphenated process of ‘re-membering’, a poetic piecing together of disjointed, scattered members and isolated communities gathered in virtual unison through their respective losses. This research is supported by The Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49141149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the current context of pervasive loss and the absence of publicly commemorative rituals, this essay proposes a reading of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ that questions the presupposition that mourning must come to an end as the completed work of memories recalled only to be sent off. While melancholia may be presented as the invention of an imaginary loss, would not the real pathology of mourning be the summary or precipitous declaration of its end? Whether we understand mourning as completable in itself or as impossibly seeking an asymptote it can never reach, whether the work of mourning is terminal or interminable, the name of the deceased stands as what is left, not only as what is inscribed on a gravestone and outlasting any living memory, but also as the very bounds of memory as sense. Not so much the end of mourning, then, as its reiterative reaffirmation, commemoration comes down to a practice of active mourning (like active forgetting), not an ‘end’ but its retreat, its appearing/disappearing as the incessant redrawing of its withdrawal. Not a self-deprecating melancholia, nor the indulgent luxury of nostalgia, but the endless inscription of a name whose loss we can never stop mourning.
{"title":"Mourning Alone Together","authors":"G. Abbeele","doi":"10.3366/olr.2022.0377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2022.0377","url":null,"abstract":"In the current context of pervasive loss and the absence of publicly commemorative rituals, this essay proposes a reading of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ that questions the presupposition that mourning must come to an end as the completed work of memories recalled only to be sent off. While melancholia may be presented as the invention of an imaginary loss, would not the real pathology of mourning be the summary or precipitous declaration of its end? Whether we understand mourning as completable in itself or as impossibly seeking an asymptote it can never reach, whether the work of mourning is terminal or interminable, the name of the deceased stands as what is left, not only as what is inscribed on a gravestone and outlasting any living memory, but also as the very bounds of memory as sense. Not so much the end of mourning, then, as its reiterative reaffirmation, commemoration comes down to a practice of active mourning (like active forgetting), not an ‘end’ but its retreat, its appearing/disappearing as the incessant redrawing of its withdrawal. Not a self-deprecating melancholia, nor the indulgent luxury of nostalgia, but the endless inscription of a name whose loss we can never stop mourning.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47243887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
An essay about hypochondria, past and present. Beginning with the observation that for centuries hypochondria has been blamed upon various forms of reading, I attempt to take seriously this venerable relationship between hypochondria and literature. By bracketing the medical and moral concerns that encumber most treatments of hypochondria, I instead seek to understand the condition as a method of reading, a close textual engagement that is at once anxious and oddly clear-sighted about its own limits, and which bears some similarities to other, more familiar hermeneutic methods such as paranoid reading and ‘too-close reading’. In the second half of the essay, I draw upon the lives and writings of Maurice Blanchot and Franz Kafka, two writers who were themselves plagued by mysterious and unexplained symptoms, and attempt to show how the imperatives of literature as understood by each writer could meaningfully be described as hypochondriacal. Above all, then, this essay looks more closely at a figure whom it is difficult to take seriously, and asks whether, viewed from a certain angle, the hypochondriac might in fact be said to be endowed with a perspicuous if discomfiting form of insight.
{"title":"Hypochondriacal Reading: Phantom Illness and Literature","authors":"W. Rees","doi":"10.3366/olr.2021.0365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2021.0365","url":null,"abstract":"An essay about hypochondria, past and present. Beginning with the observation that for centuries hypochondria has been blamed upon various forms of reading, I attempt to take seriously this venerable relationship between hypochondria and literature. By bracketing the medical and moral concerns that encumber most treatments of hypochondria, I instead seek to understand the condition as a method of reading, a close textual engagement that is at once anxious and oddly clear-sighted about its own limits, and which bears some similarities to other, more familiar hermeneutic methods such as paranoid reading and ‘too-close reading’. In the second half of the essay, I draw upon the lives and writings of Maurice Blanchot and Franz Kafka, two writers who were themselves plagued by mysterious and unexplained symptoms, and attempt to show how the imperatives of literature as understood by each writer could meaningfully be described as hypochondriacal. Above all, then, this essay looks more closely at a figure whom it is difficult to take seriously, and asks whether, viewed from a certain angle, the hypochondriac might in fact be said to be endowed with a perspicuous if discomfiting form of insight.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48575085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Derrida's essay, ‘Devant la loi’, opens with the citation of an1897 letter from Freud to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess, in which he confides that he has a presentiment he shall soon discover the origin of morality. What interests Derrida is not only the discovery that will indeed soon follow but the temporal structure of presentiment itself. Seeking to give such a vague intimation a more rigorous sense, he theorizes presentiment as a way of ‘precognizing’ something that will never otherwise have been known as such. Through close readings of Kafka, Freud and Kant, Derrida asks how the moral law itself might be thinkable only in the mode of a certain pre-, a mode whose very ‘beforeness’ has to be radically rethought.
德里达的文章《Devant la loi》开篇引用了弗洛伊德1897年写给他的朋友威廉·弗利斯的一封信，他在信中透露，他有一种预感，很快就会发现道德的起源。德里达感兴趣的不仅是不久后的发现，还有预感本身的时间结构。为了给这种模糊的暗示一种更严格的感觉，他将预感理论化为一种“预先识别”东西的方式，否则这些东西永远不会被人知道。通过仔细阅读卡夫卡、弗洛伊德和康德，德里达问道，道德法则本身如何只有在某种先验的模式下才能被思考，这种模式的“先验性”必须被彻底反思。
{"title":"A Flair for Theory: Freud, Derrida, Kafka, and Kant","authors":"Michael G. Levine","doi":"10.3366/olr.2021.0361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2021.0361","url":null,"abstract":"Derrida's essay, ‘Devant la loi’, opens with the citation of an1897 letter from Freud to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess, in which he confides that he has a presentiment he shall soon discover the origin of morality. What interests Derrida is not only the discovery that will indeed soon follow but the temporal structure of presentiment itself. Seeking to give such a vague intimation a more rigorous sense, he theorizes presentiment as a way of ‘precognizing’ something that will never otherwise have been known as such. Through close readings of Kafka, Freud and Kant, Derrida asks how the moral law itself might be thinkable only in the mode of a certain pre-, a mode whose very ‘beforeness’ has to be radically rethought.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44649696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Jacques Derrida, Theory and Practice","authors":"David Maruzzella","doi":"10.3366/olr.2021.0366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2021.0366","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42350769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay explores the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Safaa Fathy and Franco-Maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida, offering an extended reading of their court-métrage, Nom à la mer (2004)—a film about language, exile, and loss, made by a pair of wanderers both keenly interested in the spectral effects of translation as they haunt the filmic medium. Nom à la mer is a cinematic rendering of the French translation of Fathy's original, Arabic-language poem, recited by Derrida in voice-off as Fathy's camera focuses on a single, highly overdetermined site in a small Andalusian town. This essay reads the film as both an artefact of the pathos of translation and as a scene of valediction, played out by both collaborators on grounds simultaneously intimate and historical.
本文探讨了法国-埃及电影制作人萨法·法蒂和法国-马格里布哲学家雅克·德里达的电影合作，并对他们的宫廷- la mer(2004)进行了扩展阅读，这是一部关于语言，流亡和失落的电影，由一对流浪者拍摄，他们都对翻译的幽灵效应非常感兴趣，因为他们经常出现在电影媒介中。《Nom Nom la mer》是法蒂原始阿拉伯语诗歌法语翻译的电影版本，德里达在旁白中朗诵了这首诗，法蒂的镜头聚焦在安达卢西亚小镇上一个高度确定的地点。本文认为这部电影既是翻译悲怆的产物，也是两位合作者在亲密和历史的基础上进行的告别。
{"title":"Specters of Translation: Jacques Derrida, Safaa Fathy, and Nom à la mer","authors":"Max Cavitch","doi":"10.3366/olr.2021.0362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2021.0362","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Safaa Fathy and Franco-Maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida, offering an extended reading of their court-métrage, Nom à la mer (2004)—a film about language, exile, and loss, made by a pair of wanderers both keenly interested in the spectral effects of translation as they haunt the filmic medium. Nom à la mer is a cinematic rendering of the French translation of Fathy's original, Arabic-language poem, recited by Derrida in voice-off as Fathy's camera focuses on a single, highly overdetermined site in a small Andalusian town. This essay reads the film as both an artefact of the pathos of translation and as a scene of valediction, played out by both collaborators on grounds simultaneously intimate and historical.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48968233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article responds to Srinivas Aravamudan's call to revisit the notion of the trace from the standpoint of the Anthropocene. A Derridean understanding of the trace shows how postcolonial difference challenges the humanist distinction between human and nature by questioning the distinction between life and death that is central to metaphysics. This discussion thus reframes the prospect of extinction signaled by the Anthropocene by means of a return to a Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic and deconstructive trajectory within postcolonial thought.
{"title":"Postcolonial Remainders: Revisiting the Trace from the Standpoint of the Anthropocene","authors":"N. van Vliet","doi":"10.3366/olr.2021.0363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2021.0363","url":null,"abstract":"This article responds to Srinivas Aravamudan's call to revisit the notion of the trace from the standpoint of the Anthropocene. A Derridean understanding of the trace shows how postcolonial difference challenges the humanist distinction between human and nature by questioning the distinction between life and death that is central to metaphysics. This discussion thus reframes the prospect of extinction signaled by the Anthropocene by means of a return to a Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic and deconstructive trajectory within postcolonial thought.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45405171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Despite his wide-ranging and incisive engagement with Heidegger's thought across his career, Derrida seems to have written very little about Heidegger's Ereignis manuscripts, which, according to many commentators, constitute the place where Heidegger's thinking comes closest to Derridean deconstruction. Taking up Derrida's comments in Hospitality 1 on the figure of ‘selfhood’ ( Selbstheit) in Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, this essay argues that this dense but important moment of engagement with the Ereignis manuscripts reveals the extent to which Heidegger's thinking of selfhood, in spite of its fundamentally relational character, remains thoroughly determined by ipseity, the philosopheme that links selfhood, possibility, and sovereignty within the metaphysics of presence. Beginning with a reconstruction of the link between power and selfhood in Derrida's thinking of ipseity and a close-reading of the key passage in Hospitality 1, the essay then turns to Heidegger's engagement with Hölderlin to show both the depth of Heidegger's commitment to a relational thinking of selfhood and the philosophical and rhetorical safeguards by which he ensures that the relations of difference that constitute the self continue to function in the name of the ipseity, understood as the very Ur-form of sovereign power.
{"title":"The Hidden Law of Selfhood: Reading Heidegger's Ipseity after Derrida's Hospitality","authors":"Benjamin D. Brewer, Ronald Mendoza–de Jesús","doi":"10.3366/olr.2021.0364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2021.0364","url":null,"abstract":"Despite his wide-ranging and incisive engagement with Heidegger's thought across his career, Derrida seems to have written very little about Heidegger's Ereignis manuscripts, which, according to many commentators, constitute the place where Heidegger's thinking comes closest to Derridean deconstruction. Taking up Derrida's comments in Hospitality 1 on the figure of ‘selfhood’ ( Selbstheit) in Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, this essay argues that this dense but important moment of engagement with the Ereignis manuscripts reveals the extent to which Heidegger's thinking of selfhood, in spite of its fundamentally relational character, remains thoroughly determined by ipseity, the philosopheme that links selfhood, possibility, and sovereignty within the metaphysics of presence. Beginning with a reconstruction of the link between power and selfhood in Derrida's thinking of ipseity and a close-reading of the key passage in Hospitality 1, the essay then turns to Heidegger's engagement with Hölderlin to show both the depth of Heidegger's commitment to a relational thinking of selfhood and the philosophical and rhetorical safeguards by which he ensures that the relations of difference that constitute the self continue to function in the name of the ipseity, understood as the very Ur-form of sovereign power.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43211481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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