Historical Referents Research Articles

Looking Into the "Torrid Eye:" Negotiating the Limits of Selfhood in Emily Dickinson's Maelstrom Poems

Abstract: This article offers new ways of interpreting Dickinson's maelstrom poems. I turn to recent critical interest in the word "Domingo" to argue that Dickinson's maelstroms reveal the gendered questions underlying revolutionary new concepts of personhood. Identifying various historical, political, and geographical referents for Dickinson's maelstroms, I argue these poems depict white femininity as an idealized, isolated, and often therefore horrifying condition. By demonstrating how Dickinson uses the maelstrom to think together the oceanic sublime and Gothic tropes of enslavement, I locate in these poems a repeated fantasy about the possibility of escape—however painful—from these gendered and racialized circumstances.

Down with This Sort of Thing: Seth Heringer and the End of the Historical-Critical Method

Down with This Sort of Thing: Seth Heringer and the End of the Historical-Critical Method

Material City

Urban development hinges on the availability of free space. The planned growth of Helsinki as reflected in the General plan of 2016 relies on identifying areas for infill in the urban fabric. In built-up areas there is a tendency to let the processes of urban change take place instead of top-down planning. This change is therefore not managed, but piecemeal, resulting in a patchwork of ‘stamp’ plans directed by narrow private economic considerations. The life-span of buildings varies according to their material composition – also the type of a building and its spatial configuration affect its vitality. These attributes and conditions play a part in how long a building can endure before confronting the need for radical changes, and can be aggregated from open-source data and modeled using historical referents as benchmarks. This information forms a layer of probabilities in the city, revealing dormant locations facing imminent change. By mapping the information of the material conditions on the topography of the city, we can identify potentials for development. Identifying these latent sites in the city and engaging proprietors and landowners would give new tools for the City to affect the change and renewal associated with turnover of the building stock.

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Meta-Dracula: Contagion and the Colonial Gothic

Abstract This essay, excerpted with permission from my recent book Epidemic Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is about the colonial Gothic and the appearance therein of the paradigm of contagion as a metonym for political violence. I show how Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the most enduring and popular novel in this archive, is so capacious in its allegorical accommodations that it has been read as incorporating nearly every threat and monster of its own time and place, as well as those of its scenes of critical reception. More than indexing historical referents, I argue, the novel is a kind of allegory of allegories, producing new epistemes about multisystemic threats and carrying them forward into the crises of our own moment – global pandemic, terrorism, the collapse of empires. Following Fanon, who invokes the rich mythology of the vampire to point out colonial discourse’s specific habits of dehumanization, we can locate Dracula in an important archive of colonial writing that sets the ‘science’ of monsters on its infinite course and advances a reading practice that borrows from the surveillance apparatus and epidemic narrative strategies of colonial disease literature. Because of its extraordinary durability, Dracula is a crucial textual conduit in the transmission of minor ideas about the circulation of terror, rebellion, racialized bodies, foreign materials, and communicable disease from largely forgotten nineteenth-century texts and contexts into the common sense of late empire and late capitalism. Although Dracula is not a terribly self-conscious, systematically researched, or ideologically consistent text, it is decisive in its effects.

"Rendered Remarkable": Reading Race and Desire in The Woman of Colour

"Rendered Remarkable":Reading Race and Desire in The Woman of Colour Olivia Carpenter (bio) "My colour, you know, renders me remarkable," writes Olivia, the titular heroine of the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour.1 Olivia's story is indeed remarkable: she journeys from Jamaica to England to follow the wishes in her late father's will and marry her distant cousin to secure her father's fortune. The white English characters she encounters gossip about the racially distinct presence in their midst, and this gossip only worsens once it is revealed that Olivia and Augustus have accidentally committed bigamy. Early nineteenth-century readers would likewise have remarked upon the rare phenomenon of a novel with a mixed-race Black protagonist, especially one who narrates her own story and actively rewrites the traditional marriage plot.2 In this essay, I examine another aspect of Olivia's remarkable nature: the reactions she inspires in twenty-first-century readers grappling with this character's complexities and ambiguities. Today's reader finds a real paradox in Olivia, who apparently critiques racism on the one hand and idealizes the plantation on the other. Olivia becomes particularly remarkable to the twenty-first-century reader when she ostensibly espouses abolitionist politics but apparently takes possession of a benevolent plantation at the novel's end. I contend that we can untangle this paradox by recognizing the ways that The Woman of Colour remains committed to a colonial project. Olivia pairs her [End Page 247] firmest anti-racist politics with calls for more malleable racial hierarchies. She apparently seeks to improve the existing system without demanding its disintegration. This becomes clear when we examine how and why Olivia perpetuates as well as enacts colonial authority from her particular position as a mixed-race elite woman who becomes a Jamaican planter. The paradox of a novel that both condemns racist prejudice and dreams of a brighter future on the plantation makes sense in the context of its own colonial logic—a logic with real historical referents. I want to move beyond that logic, though, and demand something else from The Woman of Colour, a novel that in many ways fails to offer a successful challenge to eighteenth-century hegemonic discourse. In addition to remarking upon the crucial ways Olivia's narrative succeeds or fails to satisfy the desires of today's readers, I want to turn also to the ways this novel sheds light on the origins of those desires. England provides many opportunities for Olivia to respond to racism. George Merton, Jr., the young son of Olivia's racist brother- and sister-in-law, refers to Olivia's enslaved maid Dido as "that nasty black woman," claiming she "has been kissing me, and dirtying my face all over!" (WC, 78). At first, the Mertons assume that young George refers to Olivia, but George quickly explains that he refers to someone "much, much dirtier" (78). Even located safely off-page, Dido remains a threat in this scene. She ostensibly maintains the power to frighten a child with the darkness of her skin, a darkness that George imagines could transfer to his own skin. Without explicitly knowing it, George depends on racism grounded in biological commitments to feel safe. The threat of the Other, according to this model of racism, can be contained by containing Dido's body, which is always marked as inferior by a set of fixed, phenotypical traits. In such a context, Dido's kiss, her physical demonstration of giving and receiving affection, is transgressive. The final decades of the eighteenth century mark a shift in understandings of race in Britain from a model that took skin color into account along with factors such as religion, clothing, and customs to a model that prioritized skin color as a primary marker of difference.3 As a result, racist discourse justifying slavery turned more virulently towards the body as a site of restriction, punishment, or disempowerment. The rise of the sugar plantation across the long eighteenth century encouraged an understanding of Black bodies in utilitarian terms. Bodies matter in this discourse according to their ability to perform labor, to survive hardship, and to obey orders.4 Raised in slavery...

«Cuatro varas de sangre». Patria, comunidad política y creación de identidad colectiva en el Aragón de los siglos XVI y XVII

Diversas fuentes aragonesas de época moderna mencionan la idea de patria, entendida como lugar de nacimiento, pero también como comunidad política. En el segundo caso, la noción está ligada a la existencia de un ordenamiento jurídico y un sistema institucional propios, así como a referentes simbólicos como las «cuatro varas de sangre» representadas en el escudo del reino de Aragón. Estas construcciones culturales se enmarcan en el proceso de definición de una identidad colectiva aragonesa, asunto que será objeto de análisis en el presente artículo. Para ello se atenderá a los contenidos con que trató de perfilarse dicha identidad, a los promotores de su elaboración, a los mecanismos de creación y difusión que utilizaron y a la extensión que sus formulaciones alcanzaron en la población. Y también se subrayará que el esfuerzo por definir tal identidad cultural se produjo de forma simultánea a la inclusión del reino de Aragón en una unidad política de dimensiones universales, en la que se estaban produciendo fenómenos similares. De hecho, se procurará establecer comparaciones con otros casos, como el navarro o el catalán, con los que la identidad aragonesa compartió referentes históricos e ideológicos.

Experimentación y representación en la novela colombiana actual: Juan Cárdenas, Margarita García Robayo y Juan Álvarez

Este artículo analiza tres textos de autores colombianos contemporáneos: Juan Cárdenas, Margarita García Robayo y Juan Álvarez. Por medio del análisis de características de las novelas Los estratos, Lo que no aprendí y La ruidosa marcha de los mudos, el artículo explora la relación entre rasgos de lo que llamamos representación, en el sentido de unos referentes sociales e históricos reconocibles, y otros de lo que identificamos como experimentación, en procedimientos formales singulares de cada novela. Proponemos que esta tensión permite pensar de otras maneras los discursos sobre esos mismos referentes reconocibles de la historia y del contexto colombiano contemporáneo.

DEVELOPMENTALISM IN LATE QING CHINA, 1874–1911

AbstractThis article explores the changing historical referents that Qing officials used in arguing for the extension of direct governance to the empire's frontier regions from the 1870s to the 1900s. In the 1870s, Shen Baozhen and Zuo Zongtang made the case for a change of governance on Taiwan and in Xinjiang respectively by reference to past Chinese frontier management. However, in the first decade of the twentieth century Cen Chunxuan and Yao Xiguang both referred to the European past, and specifically the history of European colonialism, to argue for reform of frontier policy in Mongolia. I argue that this shift was a result of both the empire's altered political circumstances and a growing belief in the inevitability of an evolutionary fate which awaited nomadic peoples, who were destined to be colonized. Yet this was not a case of Chinese thinkers simply adopting European ideas and perspectives wholesale. The adoption of European historical referents was entangled with Han Chinese perceptions of Mongolian populations which had been carefully cultivated by the Manchu Qing state.

Performance Feedback Persistence: Comparative Effects of Historical Versus Peer Performance Feedback on Innovative Search

Firms use aspirations to regulate innovative search activities, but peer and historical referents may contain different signals regarding performance feedback. Integrating insights from the literature on profit persistence with the behavioral theory of the firm, we propose a persistence-based framework of organizational innovative search that connects the persistence characteristics of feedback from peer and historical referents with innovative search. We first predict that feedback from peer referents is more persistent than feedback from historical referents. Further, we theorize that peer performance feedback produces more pronounced effects: Performance above (below) peer aspiration leads to less (more) innovative search compared with performance above (below) the historical aspiration level. In addition, because industries impose heterogeneous levels of profit persistence, the differential effect between peer and historical performance feedback on innovative search is likely to be more evident in highly persistent industries. Examining the research-and-development intensity of a comprehensive panel of Compustat manufacturing firms over the past 45 years, our results from quasi–maximum likelihood analysis and fixed-effect panel regression largely support our theoretical development. Our study extends a nascent understanding of aspiration heterogeneity by revealing and empirically confirming the critical role of persistence.

“Bordas sobre la trama esencial”: Needlework as Communal Rhetorical Practice in El obsceno pájaro de la noche

This essay applies a feminist synthesis of rhetoric and material culture theory to José Donoso’s novel, El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970). Donoso’s novel depicts needlework as a communal rhetorical practice among women characters within enclosed communities. They sew, embroider, and repair. Drawing from Goggin and Tobin’s studies of needlework as rhetorical practice (2002, 2009a, 2009b, 2009), we investigate women’s needlework and sewing, contextualizing the historical and cultural referents within Chile’s long history of textile work, including the explication of epidermal aesthetics in Halart (2017). The paradoxically violent and restorative acts of sewing and repair provides the background for the many monologues the novel sets in the sewing circles of La Chimba convent. Each woman’s stitch enacts revenge for ongoing displacement and confinement to domestic spaces of home/convent. This essay argues that las viejas develop and claim a communal voice through their needlework upon the mute and bound monster of the imbunche, which becomes the fabric for their polyvocalic expression. In sewing the figure of the imbunche, the female characters participate in a tactile rhetoric that precedes verbal and occularcentric discourse and emphasizes the immediate and relational sense of touch. Our research is feminist as it recenters Donoso criticism on the female characters within his work, to showcase how their machinations and manipulations of materials enact an agency denied by a discourse and identity which prioritizes visual and verbal expression. We encourage Donoso studies towards a feminist focus on communities of women and process over individual and product.

Los "Crueles": Pedro I de Castilla frente a Pedro I de Portugal en "Adivinhas de Pedro e Inês" (1983) de Agustina Bessa-Luís

Adivinhas de Pedro e Ines (1983) by Agustina Bessa-Luis exposes the History of late medieval Iberia ―and, in particular, the one of the lovers Pedro and Ines de Castro― as a multiple and confused net of partial and contradictory versions. Seeking to demonstrate a (possible) truth as a response to a serie of «riddles» (adivinhas), the narrative re-elaborates – suppresses, adapts, changes, defamiliarizes – the historical referents. Focusing on the representation of the kings known as «the cruels» (Peter I of Castile and Peter I of Portugal) this article analyses how the narrator’s odd and committed perspective combines the ironic, critical and playful purpose of postmodern historic metafiction with the formal features of the «new historiography».

Dying of the Stranger's Disease: Yellow Fever, Narrative Space, and the Art of Exclusion in Absalom, Absalom!

Dying of the Stranger's Disease:Yellow Fever, Narrative Space, and the Art of Exclusion in Absalom, Absalom! Edward Clough (bio) Introduction: The Sutpen Cemetery At the physical, narrative, and thematic center of Absalom, Absalom!, in one of the novel's most memorable and vivid moments, Quentin Compson encounters the Sutpen family cemetery, seeking shelter when rain interrupts a quail hunt with his father. Later, as he recalls his impression at the beginning of a night's storytelling with his Harvard roommate Shreve, Quentin vividly visualizes those collected graves: the two flat heavy vaulted slabs, the other three headstones leaning a little awry, with here and there a carved letter or even an entire word momentary and legible in the faint light which the raindrops brought particle by particle into the gloom and released[.] (156) The imagery of light and dark, stasis and change, speaks resonantly to the novel's larger patterns of revelation and obfuscation, of things "momentary and legible." Moreover, in its correlation of narrative and burial plots, this image also materializes much of the novel's narrative space.1 This spatial-narrative analogy works precisely because these plots are visibly unequal. The hierarchies of life persist in death: it is the grand, vaulted slabs of Thomas Sutpen and his wife, cracked and worn but still "quite legible," that are physically and narratively approached first (156–57). And it is only subsequently that Quentin is compelled to brush back the heavy fall of cedar needles to make legible the inscription on the other, more faded [End Page 89] headstones, "leaning a little awry": of Charles Bon, Sutpen's spurned, and likely mixed-race, son (158); of Bon's own son, Charles Etienne de Saint Valery Bon (158); and of Sutpen's daughter, Judith, whose grave lies "at the opposite side of the enclosure, as far from the other four as the enclosure would permit" (174). The cemetery consolidates and reveals, in a single site and image, the Sutpen family's fatal history. It reveals, in particular, how Sutpen's plantation "design" (218) was doomed by the very exclusion of his firstborn mixed-race son, Bon, that he believed would ensure its preservation.2 Killed by his white half-brother Henry, in a tragic escalation of his father's earlier rejection, Bon rests in death beside the father who rejected him in life, with the dynastic plantation design shrunk down to a small plot of burial ground. Yet amidst this physical revelation, there is also mystery. Why are the graves of Bon, Charles Etienne, and Judith so deliberately differentiated from—and rendered so less legible than—those of Sutpen and his wife? And why, still more noticeably, is Judith's grave set apart from the others? This latter question is partially addressed by Quentin's wry observation that "whoever had buried Judith must have been afraid that the other dead would contract the disease from her" (174)—the disease in question being yellow fever. The observation is not intended literally: beyond the physical impossibility of post-mortem contraction, Quentin also knows—through recollection of his father's account immediately before this (173–74)—that Charles Etienne already had yellow fever, and that Judith contracted it while nursing him. A further question arises, then: why, if they died almost simultaneously, of the same disease, were Judith and Charles Etienne buried apart? To answer these questions is to uncover the submerged yet profound significance of sickness and yellow fever within Faulkner's novel as historical referents and narrative structures. "Cultural margins and national borders are often summoned, if not articulated, through the figure of specific contagious diseases," Wald, Tomes, and Lynch argue (3), and this is very much true of Southern yellow fever discourses. Known as yellow jack, vómito negro, and most significantly "the stranger's disease," yellow fever haunted the consciousness of the US South as both sickness and symbol (Carrigan 64). The swift and devastating effects of outbreaks—such as the 1878 summer epidemic, which claimed 20,000 lives in the Mississippi Valley (Humphreys, Yellow Fever 10)—along with yellow fever's historically unknown [End Page 90] origins and visually striking re-coloring of skin, helped the disease...

The Reception of Machiavelli in Early Modern Spain by Keith David Howard

Reviewed by: The Reception of Machiavelli in Early Modern Spain by Keith David Howard Susan Byrne Howard, Keith David. The Reception of Machiavelli in Early Modern Spain. Wood-bridge: Tamesis, 2014. 171 pp. ISBN: 978-18-5566-282-7. Howard begins his monograph with captivating quotations from Machiavelismo degollado por la Christiana Sabiduría de España y Austria, a work by Claudio Clemente published in 1637. Clemente's polemical tone nicely sets the stage for the discussion that follows and for Howard's expressed goal: to demonstrate "the observable appropriation of key Machiavellian concepts" (5) by Spanish political writers who simultaneously masked those conceptual adoptions with anti-Machiavellian rhetoric. Multiple early modern political writings are incorporated to lay a clear foundation for, and solid support to, Howard's contentions. In chapter 1, "Medieval and Renaissance Humanist Political Discourse and Machiavelli," Howard skillfully synthesizes the historical development of political, theological and societal concepts on kingship and rulers while demonstrating the impact of that thought on Spanish writers with relevant textual citations. A section on virtue and fortune includes examples from Boethius, Petrarch and Cicero, to Coluccio Salutati and Giovanni Pontano, all as background to Diego de Valera's discussion of prudence in his Doctrinal de príncipes (1475). As Howard sums up: "Valera develops the idea that human providence and prudence exist not in the realm of certainty but in the limited human perspective of probability" (32), i.e., Valera, like his (semi) contemporary Machiavelli, speaks of political contingency. Here and throughout, Howard shows a keen eye for lexical detail and conceptual expression; his close readings are sharp and focused. In chapter 2, "Machiavelli and Spanish Imperialist Discourse in the Sixteenth Century," Howard studies how the demands of unification and expansion led to "a more practical understanding of political power" (42), hence a greater role for [End Page 168] Machiavelli's writings. With a review of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese writings, the political landscape is described cogently, telling textual examples are offered. In counsel given by Furió Ceriol to Phillip II, Howard finds the same overarching remedies proposed by Machiavelli, while the writings of Balthazar de Ayala show multiple parallels to Machiavelli's Discourses through use of identical figures and events to exemplify, even as corrections are made to mistaken historical referents. Howard's close study reveals the unattributed yet obvious incorporation of Machi-avellian thought into Spanish political treatises prior to his inclusion on the Roman Index in 1559. Chapter 3, "Machiavelli and the Foundations of the Spanish Reason-of-State Tradition: Giovanni Botero and Pedro de Ribadeneyra," begins with examples of changing French attitudes towards Machiavelli following the Index listing. A strong case is made for adaptation with parallel criticism of the Italian diplomat through Botero, who develops Machiavelli's ideas while suggesting that the Catholic religion serves as a more secure platform for a king than other religious creeds. Catholicism is an "instrument to keep his subjects obedient and thus to conserve his state" (78). Turning to Ribadeneyra, Howard shows that the Spanish Jesuit was "very familiar" (90) with both the Prince and the Discourses, and he illustrates quite convincingly with Ribadeneyra's unequivocal dictum that a ruler must never lie quickly undermined by his contention that dissimulation, secretive withholding of information, and doubleentendres that one knows or suspects will be misunderstood are not lies but, rather, acts of prudence. This chapter highlights the creation and exploitation of a dichotomy between "good" and "bad" reason of state, a "double-sided technique" (95) that would persist in subsequent Spanish political writings. In chapter 4, "Machiavellian Discourse in the Hispanic Baroque Reason-of-State Tradition," Howard addresses later developments in attitudes towards the Italian diplomat, showing how even Spanish writers who do not directly address political matters will continue to spread Machiavelli's concepts. Here again, Howard finds many lexical subtleties that reveal conceptual content, as he highlights the continued reliance on Machiavellian doctrinal stances accompanied by simultaneous denial of the same thought. In numerous examples adduced, the Spaniards are shown to use lexical gymnastics as a way exploit loopholes while providing cover through a stance of moral flexibility. Barbosa Homem, for example, asserts "astute" as a positive trait...

Two Hands, Two Decks and a Theory in Action: Expanding Thinking Vocabularies of Learners in the 21st Century

A complex 21st century offers us complex problems. We need more complex ways to think in order to solve them—such as Ken Wilber’s integral thinking. In this article, utilizing historical education referents for reconceptualizing curriculum in order to create more emphasis on meta-cognitive thinking about thinking, I offer a playful arts-based inquiry and performance of a unique curriculum device (a deck of thinking cards) that allows educators and researchers to bring forward their diverse vocabulary of types of thinking. I assert that it is time we passed on this vocabulary to our youth, to access and utilize in their own human potential growth and transformation into integral thinkers.

Aprendizaje por la acción – el principo didáctico de la formación técnico-profesional alemana

This article presents the historical roots, referents, general criteria, goals and processes that characterize the German experience of learning by doing. The complete action model is described as one of the methodological axes, as well as the growing importance of learning by doing in the reform of German technical-vocational training during the last 20 years.

Medievalism Key Critical Terms eds. by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz

Reviewed by: Medievalism Key Critical Terms eds. by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz Riccardo Raimondo Medievalism Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer Editions 2014) 281 pp. The volume Medievalism Key Critical Terms edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz appeared in 2014 in the collection "Medievalism" (D. S. Brewer Editions) that compiles works treating the influence and appearance of 'the medieval' in the society and culture of later ages. The directors begin their introduction with a tribute to Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin, the initiators of "medievalism" throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The project of such a dictionary was initially Leslie Workman's but remained incomplete at 2001, the year of his death. With the present volume, directors do not hope to be as comprehensive as an encyclopedia, but they wish to follow the intuition of Workman and deepen the "terms used when speaking of medievalism" (1). But this dictionary does not only explore essential terms used when speaking of the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times. It appears to draw a dynamic map of the "medieval imaginary" (149), like a changing cartography of medievalism. The form of such a dictionary invites the readers to confront themselves with an "open structure" that is not only the mark of a heuristic approach but also a real epistemological method. Indeed, not only is the concept of a uniform period known as the "Middle Ages" a construction in itself, an "open schema", but many stereotypes associated with the Middle Ages also "do not always have specific historical referents" (2). [End Page 233] Interestingly enough, the framework of this dictionary is based on a series of traditional oppositions that have been at the centre of debates in the history of this relatively young discipline. In their introduction, Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin outline these oppositions by scanning every headword. On the one hand, they lay the emphasis on dichotomies like alterity/modernity, subjectivity/objectivity, medieval/neomedieval, on the other hand, they show the current implications of an old polemic, between medievalism and traditional medieval studies. Rather than seeing medievalism studies at the margin of medieval studies or as bringing up its rear, we see medievalism, the term and paradigm, as methodologically broad and flexible enough to comprise not only 'dated' medieval studies scholarship, but also modern scholarship self-aware enough to recognize its role in the ongoing recreation—academic, artistic, popular, technological—of what is considered medieval culture (7). In the years to come, this list of key terms will certainly lay the foundations for the renewal of medievalist disciplines, by broadening their outlook and improving their hermeneutical tools. To conclude, we wish to stress the importance of such an approach, not only in Reception Studies, but also in Translation Studies that are becoming, more and more, the foundations for any reception research. As an annexe to this review, these are the covered critical terms: "Archive" by Matthew Fisher; "Authority" by Gwendolyn Morgan; "Christianity" by William Calin; "Co-disciplinarity" by Jonathan Hsy; "Continuity" by Karl Fugelso, "Feast" by Martha Carlin, "Genealogy" by Zrinka Stahuljak, "Gesture" by Carol l. Robinson, "Gothic" by Kevin Murphy And Lisa Reilly, "Heresy" by Nadia Margolis, "Humor" by Clare a. Simmons, "Lingua" by M.J. Toswell, "Love" by Juanita Feros Ruys, "Memory" by Vincent Ferré, "Middle" by David Matthews, "Modernity" by Tom Shippey, "Monument" by E. L. Risden, "Myth" by Martin Arnold, "Play" by Brent Moberly And Kevin Moberly, "Presentism" by Louise D'arcens, "Primitive" by Laura Morowitz, "Purity" by Amy s. Kaufman, "Reenactment" by Michael a. Cramer, "Resonance" by Nils Holger Petersen, "Simulacrum" by Lauren s. Mayer, "Spectacle" by Angela Weisl, "Transfer" by Nadia Altschul, "Trauma" by Kathleen Biddick, "Troubadour" by Elizabeth Fay. Riccardo Raimondo CERILAC and CERLIM, Université Sorbonne Paris Cité Copyright © 2017 Regents of the University of California

The Empty Symbol and Its Relation to the Psychoanalytic Process

ABSTRACTAnalysts need to be aware that each word used by a patient is composed of a constant conjunction of a person’s intimate emotional and historical referents, conscious and unconscious affects, memories, and conceptions and fantasies. If this conjunction does not correspond to that of the analyst, a gap develops between them. This gap in meaning is a non-understanding that emerges outside consciousness and beyond words. The author conceptualizes this relational phenomenon as the Empty Symbol.

High Road to Hell: Milton, Blake, McCarthy

Abstract This article demonstrates that the poetry of William Blake irradiates Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel, Blood Meridian, where it occupies one side of a dialectical relationship with the work of another poet, John Milton. The essay's argument is that the poetic works of Milton and Blake strain against one another from within McCarthy's prose to determinately shape how we read the novel. It seeks to show how an understanding of why certain literary influences are enunciated will contribute to our knowledge of the book's relationship to its thematic content and historical referents.

Interpreting from the Interstices: The Role of Justice in a Liberal Democracy—Lessons from Michael Walzer and Emmanuel Levinas

Interpreting from the IntersticesThe Role of Justice in a Liberal Democracy—Lessons from Michael Walzer and Emmanuel Levinas Nicholas R. Brown (bio) 1 As anyone who is familiar with more recent theological debate can attest, the appraisal of the liberal democratic tradition has undergone a radical reevaluation in the wake of Stanley Hauerwas’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s scathing critiques. As a result of their blistering assault, religious ethicists and philosophers now find themselves operating within a discursive milieu that is almost the photo negative of the one they previously inhabited. For what has followed After Virtue and After Christendom is a situation in which compliance with liberal democratic norms is now perceived as actively inveighing against justice rather than as an integral prerequisite to its pursuit. There are cracks, however, beginning to emerge in the MacIntyre/Hauerwas edifice. For what is becoming disputed and increasingly so among a growing chorus of religious ethicists and philosophers is whether their critical reading of liberal democracy offers the most [End Page 155] helpful or even the most biblical way to think through its own moral dimensions as well as those undergirding its relationship with justice. It is the emergence of these criticisms that forms the basis for this essay. For the thesis that I wish to advance below is that liberal democracy offers religious ethicists and philosophers alike a moral framework and vocabulary from which it is possible to comprehend and enact the normative precepts encapsulated within a biblical understanding of justice. Accordingly, some aspects of my argument will build upon the rhetorical trajectories that have been already charted by the ethicists and philosophers I mention above. What distinguishes my approach, however, is that I will proceed from a more focused examination of some of the ethical and political undercurrents found within contemporary Jewish thought. More specifically, I want to probe the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the political philosophy of Michael Walzer, for I believe the juxtapositional methodology of interpretation which informs each of their perspectives is illustrative of an interstitial hermeneutic that helps further illuminate the moral compatibility between biblical and democratic accounts of justice. 2 By now, MacIntyre’s and Hauerwas’s critiques of the liberal democratic tradition have been so thoroughly documented, discussed, and dissected that a review of their perspectives cannot help but have a certain pleonastic quality. Probably the most significant and disturbing problem that MacIntyre and Hauerwas see belying the liberal democratic tradition stems from its conception of time and space, or more precisely, its lack thereof. For what they discover upon a more careful probing of its moral and epistemological underpinnings is a pursuit of transcendence not dissimilar to Gnostic metaphysics. In the case of liberalism, however, the existential encumbrances to be excised are not corporeal and carnal in nature, but historical and social. [End Page 156] Such conditionalities, surmise liberal theorists, are so shot through with conceptual prejudices that they comprise an interpretative straight-jacket that vitiates against the kind of objectivity necessary to engage in a nonparochial process of moral and political discernment. For it is precisely this ability “to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity” which MacIntyre sees as constituting “the essence of moral agency” of modern liberalism (AV 31–32). Therefore, “liberalism is successful,” maintains Hauerwas, “exactly because . . . [it] provide[s] that philosophical account of society designed to deal with” the moral and political implications such a social and historical denuding portends, namely “a system of rules that will constitute procedures for resolving disputes as they pursue their various interests.”1 However, what liberalism defines as success MacIntyre and Hauerwas see as anything but. Instead, both judge its “system of rules” to be an insidious prescription for a particularly virulent form of moral nihilism and political bankruptcy. For by stripping moral and political discourse of their historical and social referents, liberalism, ironically and tragically, eviscerates itself of the very heuristic and discursive practices necessary to make those...