Jean-Joseph Goux Research Articles

From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter

Reviewed by: From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social ed. by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter Eleanor Courtemanche (bio) From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter; pp. xiii + 287. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $119.99, $84.99 paper, $64.99 ebook. This fascinating and useful volume of essays marks a new stage in the study of political economy from the standpoint of Victorian studies. This subfield, with its origins in New Historicism and the "New Economic Criticism," has developed new branches in response [End Page 521] to recent work on environmental crisis, the history of slavery, and critiques of inequality that sharpened after the global financial crisis of 2008 (5). This subfield of Victorian studies has always had an edge of ideology critique, in its claim that axioms of economic law have been abstracted from their historical and social contexts and then used to dominate discourses of capitalist experience. Yet it was also defined at the outset by a rather abashed bracketing out of Marxism, as in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (1999), which claimed that "most literary critics' knowledge of economics begins and ends with Karl Marx" (edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen [Routledge], 12). In response, scholars drilled down specifically on the British tradition of political economy, including the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus, as well as representatives of the neoclassical or marginalist turn such as William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall, and a vast, shadowy host of otherwise-forgotten economists. The goal was to carefully disentangle this theoretical tradition from its oversimplification as "capitalist ideology," and to read it for its own internal contradictions and use of literary terms, as well as its historical embeddedness in an age of turbulent industrialization and imperial expansion. That subfield was mapped out by Catherine Gallagher, Mary Poovey, and Regenia Gagnier between roughly 1985 and 2005 in work that articulated the crucial transition between "political economy," a term that admits that economics is a field structured by power, and "economic theory," which naturalizes its prescriptions with narrow mathematical certainty (10). As its title suggests, this volume follows in this tradition by defending the "social" against the presumably anti-social abstractions of economic theory. Its general thrust is to defend the empirical and inductive—observed social life and historical impasses—rather than to follow the path of formalist analysis laid out by Jean-Joseph Goux and Marc Shell, or of Marxist-semiotic analyses of money and credit as themselves fictional. The autonomy of fictional or aesthetic ways of knowing is not the main point here. But the banishment of Marx is over, and this volume is a welcome opening in Victorian studies to some non-British and even radical approaches to economic history. The volume's introduction frames its task in terms of this critical genealogy, stressing its allegiance to historical rigor and aversion to presentism. But it also defines its intervention as making the connections between contemporary capitalist crisis and the study of the nineteenth century more "directly" than earlier work—perhaps more in the line of Audrey Jaffe's The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock Market Graph (2010), which connected Victorian and contemporary obsessions with stock market graphs (7). I am not sure any of this work will ever give a University of Chicago economist even a momentary twinge of regret about their discipline's limitations. However, in an age when neoliberalism seems to be cracking under multiple pressures, the opportunities for critical engagement with economics extend beyond rereading the classics. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which used novels by Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac to illustrate a world of inherited financial inequality that might be returning, is referenced by several writers as a new interdisciplinary interlocutor. Though unified by their engagement with nineteenth-century political economy, the essays in this volume splinter out in many directions, each engaging with a new set of contemporary theorists and problems. [End Page 522] The essays...

The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England by Diane Cady

Reviewed by: The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England by Diane Cady Rosemary O'Neill Diane Cady. The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Pp. ix, 189. $84.99 cloth; $69.99 e-book. This innovative, engaging study explores how gender and economics are mutually reinforcing discourses in the literature of late medieval England, a time before the bifurcation of political economy from domestic economy [End Page 393] (a change Cady locates in the eighteenth century) occluded their interdependence (7). The book analyzes a wide range of poems in Middle English, from works by Chaucer and Gower to anonymous romances, to uncover a set of interlocking representations of gender and money. In text after text, Cady finds that wealth is a masculine prerogative, while poverty is emasculating; women are objects for possession, simultaneously untrustworthy and fickle like money itself. As she persuasively argues, these insights hold profound implications for how to think about both gender and economics, in the medieval period and also in the present day. Taking as its focus "gender as ideology" rather than embodied gender, Cady's analysis is particularly indebted to the work of Gayle Rubin ("The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" [1977]) and Jean-Joseph Goux (Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud [1973, trans. 1990]). The influence of the former resonates most strongly in the book's organization around narratives of heterosexual courtship, in which men's relationships to material goods are negotiated through their relationships to women, and vice versa. In the introduction, Cady situates her argument within the rich vein of recent work in Middle English on economics and literature (4). Yet in blending historicism with psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches, the book also harkens back to the New Economic Criticism of the 1990s (6). Chapter 2, the first body chapter, elaborates two main claims: "Money and women have a similar nature, one that is marked by instability and movement," and "the link between erotic and fiscal possession in the medieval cultural imaginary [is crucial to] the construction of male identity" (13). To develop these claims, Cady explores medieval theories of reproduction as well as monetary value, before offering a series of close readings that illustrate the fickle qualities of female characters and their role as repositories of value in a series of representative texts, including the Lady Meed episode of Piers Plowman, Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal, and The Reeve's Tale. The book's third chapter attends to a single text, the anonymous late medieval/Tudor romance The Squire of Low Degree, to explore how the text "enact[s] … fiscal and sexual fantasies" (33) that are essentially intertwined as the Squire seeks both love and money in the King of Hungary's court. Cady reads the king's daughter's seven-year retreat to her chamber in the company of a dead body as a refusal to participate in the erotic economy in lieu of a more transgressive expression of libidinal energy. The daughter ultimately returns to circulation through her [End Page 394] father's power, revealing both a conservative gender ideology that reserves power and wealth for the sovereign patriarch, and the conservatism of the romance genre more generally. Chapter 4 announces a new section, which turns to the notion of value itself and "how gendered notions of economy inform the ways we think about value, especially in realms that the West often treats as 'value free' or beyond economy, such as friendship, love, and poetics" (51). The three chapters that follow are an especially coherent and successful section of the book, perhaps because they mark a concurrent narrowing in focus to the nature of masculinity within the gendered economy. The fourth chapter, on Lydgate's Fabula duorum mercatorum, takes up friendship and its discontents within the context of the interested exchanges of goods that the characters' livelihoods comprise. The flow of goods between the narrative's two merchants allows us to chart an anxious masculinity, hemmed in by dangers: to trade in goods is to risk loss, yet to be too free with...

Faste penge og flydende kød: Materialitet og neoklassisk økonomi i Zolas Nana og Penge

This article examines the dynamics of matter and signifiers in Zola’s two novels Nana (1880) and Money (1891). Though Zola’s novels are often read with a focus on capital and economics workings, the context of marginalist economics contemporaneous to Zola is only vaguely described. In drawing upon Jean-Joseph Goux’s work on marginalism and Zola, this topic is addressed, and the article discusses desire, fluidity, scarcity, and value and relates this to the depiction of a disintegrating matter in Nana, and to the motifs of flesh and gold running through the novel. In the reading of Money, the focus is on reckless desire and imagination gone awry, and the push towards an increasingly disconnected abstraction that allows for rapid circulation of values. Here, the two main speculative duelists are seen as representatives of two economic paradigms, and the article finally discusses the depiction of materiality and the uses of this in the novels in the context of a society where values, in the words of Goux, are increasingly fluid and mobile.

La littérature au prisme de l’économie: argent et roman en France au XIXe siècle éd. par Francesco Spandri

Reviews 269 principe échappe le plus souvent à l’auteur lui-même” (65). This endeavor inevitably bears the mark of an author’s point of view and, according to Bourdieu, encompasses the entire history of the field of literature (67). As for the reception of literary works, a sociological approach seeks to go beyond a quantitative approach by providing an appreciation of the various modes of appropriation and interpretation to which works are subjected over time. Needless to say, a “sociologie de la lecture” proves eminently daunting in its realization. Moreover, it is a task whose complexity has only grown as a result of the international circulation of literature and literary theory. New fields, such as the sociology of translation and the sociology of transnational modes of appropriation are emerging. In concluding her concise, dense, and most valuable survey Sapiro notes that“si de nombreuses pistes de recherche ont été ouvertes, il reste beaucoup à faire” (108), thus stating what has become both obvious and challenging in the area of her investigations. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis Spandri, Francesco, éd. La littérature au prisme de l’économie: argent et roman en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2981-1. Pp. 400. 49 a. This important collection, comprised of an introduction and eighteen essays, sees the novelistic imaginary and monetary logic as intertwining worlds, producing a reflection on money in its triple nature of formal principle, thematic network, and cultural object.Adhesion to economic theories and Marxist criticism can only provide an approximation of what the truth of money in literature might be. We must return to the inaugural moments of the novel’s constitution, the eighteenth century, and reexamine texts like Le paysan parvenu and Manon Lescaut, in order to discover the avenues later explored by novelists in the century of the industrial revolution and triumphant capitalism.After Spandri’s historical introduction, five essays treat matters of form. Pierluigi Pellini analyses economic topoi in the Rougon-Macquart, in comparison with models in Balzac and Dickens. Jean-Joseph Goux, Éric Bordas, and Susi Pietri study Balzac, the first establishing links between the omniscience of money and the omniscient narrator, the next examining the various registers of the financial lexicon, and the latter looking at how various contemporaries like Henry James and Hugo von Hoffmannsthal understood the Comédie humaine. Christophe Reffait asks what representations of states of matter in Jules Verne’s tales have to say about money and its circulation. The next section treats financial themes and contains two more essays on Balzac, Fabrice Wilhelm analyzing the unique figure of the prodigal father, and Paolo Tortonese studying the intricate relationships between interest, self-love, and motivation. Yves Ansel shows how attitudes about money and privilege in Stendhal betray certain aristocratic prejudices, François Vanoosthuyse demonstrates the consolatory function of the popular novel in his essay on ideological issues in the Comte de Monte-Cristo, and Agnese Silvestri shows how, in George Sand, the future is open to those who use their wealth to prepare a more equal future. Luca Pietromarchi asks the extent to which the Flaubertian description of human relations obeys the dynamics of commerce and finance. Karen Haddad and Pierre Glaudes examine the abstract nature of money, the former seeing it as something that vanishes in Dostoyevsky, the latter understanding it as a source of deep spiritual anxiety in Léon Bloy. Valerio Cordiner studies the realistic fresco of industrials and bankers of the Third Republic in the virtuosic writings of Maurice Barrès. The final section sees money as a cultural object.Annamaria Lessara examines the paradoxical relationships between bourgeois ideology and dandyism in Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and Baudelaire.Maria Luisa Maniscalco analyses the contribution that Alexis de Tocqueville made in creating the sub-discipline of the sociology of money. Carole ChristenLecuyer uses the example of savings banks, founded in 1818, to show how propaganda literature and novels employed pedagogies of money to resolve social questions. Finally, François Vatin demonstrates how the works of Eugène Buret (1811–43), known as a social investigator of poverty, cannot be disassociated from his literary Romanticism. This motley, enjoyable collection provides an invaluable...

‘Global’ Identity or the (Ir)Reducible Other: The Cultural Logic of Global Identity in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Man with the Twisted Lip

Abstract After the Syrian civil war, deaths of those fleeing crisis areas have tragically become a regular news item. Not new to the world, however, such crises emerge from tensions between identity and difference as codified in international politics, whereby refugees and migrants become the Other and subject to unyielding universals, such as the law or narrow concepts of what is right. Indeed, the cultural logic of “global identities” informing the current refugee and migrant crisis seems recurrent, as exemplified in the recent cases of the Tamils from Sri Lanka and the Somalis. The cultural logic of global identity is also reflected in the popular nineteenth-century novella by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Man with the Twisted Lip, in which the main character disguises himself as a professional beggar to appeal to middle class values in order to incite their guilty consciences. Drawing on Ian Baucom, Marc Shell, and Jean-Joseph Goux, this article argues that the main character’s actions reflect and embody the cultural logic of the global politico-economy in late nineteenth century London. As such, Doyle’s novella illustrates the Derridean notion of hospitality by revealing that “identity and difference are mutually constitutive” (Baker 109) and offers insightful commentary on the current refugee and migrant crisis.

Conversion Experiences: Money and Other Strange Gods in The Female American

When universal law is recognized, idols are destroyed.—Jean-Joseph Goux, “The Temple of Utopia”In the brave new world that Unca Eliza Winkfield plots for herself, her husband, and the natives she h...

Matthieu Larnaudie. Une Écriture de (La) Crise

Drawing on Jean-Joseph Goux's analysis of André Gide's The Counterfeiters as the book accounting the modern financial representation with the disappearance of gold money, this article aims to show that novelisation of the 2008 economic crisis in Les Effondrés leads Mathieu Larnaudie to display the crisis of language itself. In the ruins of the defunct liberal economy, Larnaudie excavates the ideology that has led his characters into turmoil only to produce a narration in which the absolute present of the narration both performs and withholds the catastrophe.

A woman in a man’s world: La Banquière, money, transgression and the world of high finance

Money and finance, although central in our everyday life and crucial to the making of a film, are seldom the central topic of films. French cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s offers some significant mainstream films centring on the world of money and high finance, at a time when the value of money, since the severance of the gold-exchange standard in 1971, is no longer aligned to that of gold. This article focuses on La Banquière and the way money, finance and their representation inform the story and the film’s aesthetic choices. An historical drama inspired by the life of Marthe Hanau, a bisexual and pioneering Parisian banker of the 1920s, who became the source of one of the major financial and political scandals of the Third Republic, La Banquière features Romy Schneider in the lead role. A box-office success, the film is unique in showing a woman in a position of economic and political power. Just as in other films about the invisibility of large-scale transactions, money, when visible on screen, usually as banknotes or cheques, is bad money, the sign of a transgression of some kind, leading, paradoxically, to terrible consequences. This article offers an understanding of money represented on screen through the theoretical work of Jean-Joseph Goux.

Totuus ja spekulaatio

Truth and Speculation: Money in Realist Fiction The article focuses on representations of money in classical realist (1850–1880) fiction from two angles. Firstly, it looks at how descriptions of money in realist fiction reflect the great monetary changes of the 19th century (most notably, the universalization of paper money and credit, and the emergence of market society), and their effect on people’s mental image of money. During the 19th century money changes from a relatively stabile token of wealth into a volatile thing with speculative value, and the emotions related to this change – desire and distress – are often described with great precision in realist fiction. Secondly, this article examines how paper money in realist fiction often foregrounds the problem of credibility in representation as such, in spite of the fact that credibility was the cornerstone of realist poetics. In this study, the question of credibility, and the kind of double standard it requires from both readers and money users, is seen through concepts of speculation and gold standard. Both concepts refer to actual 19th-century economic phenomena. But they have also been used by literary critics like Catherine Gallagher, Walter Benn Michaels and Jean-Joseph Goux as descriptive metaphors for reading strategies that are essentially modern: reading fictional narrative as plausible.

The Si(eye)ght of Trauma: Oedipal Wounds, Tragic Visions, and Averted Gazes from the Time of Sophocles to the Twenty-First Century

The Si(eye)ght of TraumaOedipal Wounds, Tragic Visions, and Averted Gazes from the Time of Sophocles to the Twenty-First Century Panayiota Chrysochou (bio) In this article I set out to explore Sophocles’ classical tragedy Oedipus Rex and how this tragedy transposes the eye/I of vision from objective reality into an “inner” vision—or more metaphorically and topographically, the “mind’s eye”—and how this introjection, on a performative and aesthetic level, leads to trauma for both the actors and the audience. When Oedipus, for example, is affronted with the frightful “possibility” of seeing his parents in the afterlife, such ghostly (re)visitations, which objectively mark an unseen event, manifest themselves as an interior reality in the protagonist’s psyche, marking the traumatic or mimetic moment when meaning and representation break down along the axis of interpretation, and the traumatic gap or lacuna between signifier (word/gesture) and signified (message/meaning) widens. By drawing on the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s reformulation of Freud’s theories regarding the “enigmatic signifier,” which functions as untranslatable, hieroglyphic sign, and Cathy Caruth’s theories on trauma, together with Jean-Joseph Goux’s philosophic ideas on Greek tragic theatre), I would like to show how this gap between self and other, actor and audience—a gap that cannot be bridged—opens out a plenitude of interpretive possibilities for performance theory and theatre practice in general. In order to do this, let us start with the gaze. The question of the gaze has occupied a central position in both Western literature and philosophy since ancient times.1 There has been a repeated preoccupation with the [End Page 15] interrelationships between vision, knowledge, and perception, a preoccupation that can be traced as far back as the fifth century AD in ancient Greek theatre. More recently various lines of inquiry regarding sight (or the site of theatre) have also tried to take account of the performative and traumatic ramifications of viewing particular events, both on stage and in real life, and how tragedy—imagined, actual or various—can lead to trauma via its localization in sight and perception. Paradoxically, however, the sight/site of a tragic event is not a necessary prerequisite for the acquisition of trauma, which may be triggered by an imagined event in the mind’s eye. In other words, trauma serves as an ambivalent marker on the cusp between perception and representation. Yet the very notion of trauma itself (taken from the Greek and meaning “wound”) wavers between the intrapsychical and the social, the physiological and the psychical, “affect[ing] the whole organization.”2 Thus while medicine has in the main recognized trauma as purely physical, Freud’s psychoanalytic framework brought psychical trauma onto the scene also, in the form of an “internal foreign body,” a shock to the system, which originates primarily from without and attacks—secondarily—from within. As he points out in Studies on Hysteria, the psychical trauma “acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must be continued to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.”3 There is then an internal-external bind or double logic here—what Laplanche terms “a kind of internal-external instance”—in which trauma curiously wavers between inner and outer worlds.4 Although an event may be external, the trauma (or rather the memory of the trauma) it produces in the subject is at once physical and—although belatedly—psychical. I would like to hold onto this idea of trauma as wavering between the internal and external, since it is precisely this wavering or oscillation of trauma that, in my view, lends the notion of vision in Oedipus Rex such an ambivalent status, making it appear at once psychical and social, virtual and real, a matter of both (traumatic) representation and perception at the same time. This may well be why Oedipus as character-cum-actor can neither be adequately represented nor perceived by the reader or audience.5 His (re)presentation necessarily precludes the audience’s perception of him. Jean-Pierre Vernant aptly points this out: [End Page 16] As soon as Oedipus has been “elucidated,” uncovered, presented as a spectacle of horror for...

Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Nature of Money: Authority, Regulation of Standards, and the Law of the Father

What is money? Although we use it every day, and although it determines our lives to a very high degree, we do not actually know what it is. And 'we' here does not just denote us ordinary citizens who are unfamiliar with the basic principle of economics, but also the scientists and specialists who should know better. As the author of a recent study on monetary policy in late Roman antiquity notes, historians have long pointed out that has assumed 'a bewildering variety of forms' throughout history--'from cowrie shells to cigarettes'. (1) At the same time, economists like to emphasise that can 'perform several different functions: medium of exchange, measure of value, unit of account, store of wealth and means of payment'. (2) Taken together, these different forms and functions make up such a complicated picture that scientists who try to describe it can only agree to disagree: 'a precise definition of the term money has long eluded the consensus of economists, historians and anthropologists'. (3) In what follows I want to suggest that psychoanalysis might join this ongoing discussion about the nature of money. The passage from Freud's work most commonly quoted with regard to is to be found in On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism (1917). Here Freud sets out from the observation that 'in the products of the unconscious spontaneous ideas, fantasies and symptoms--the concepts faeces (money, gift), baby and penis are ill-distinguished from one another and are easily interchangeable'. (4) Analysing the relations between these interchangeable concepts, Freud claims that a certain infantile 'interest in faeces' is later--in the life of the adult--'continued partly as interest in money'. (5) From that it has sometimes been concluded that the analogy between faeces and makes up for an actual psychoanalytic theory of money. In my opinion, however, this is a rather weak theory. It is notable that Freud does not contribute to explaining how comes into being, but rather he describes a certain perception and reaction on the side of a child which is suddenly confronted with the 'gift' (6) of money. If there is any value to such an observation, I suspect, it might be with regard to the notion of the gift. In fact, the analogy between faeces and the gift is what Freud seems to be most interested in. He is not primarily concerned with money, but rather with an anthropological theory of the gift, as explored at around the same time by--among others--Marcel Mauss in his Essai sur le don (1924). Leaving aside these anthropological theories of the gift, I instead want to approach the question of from a different psychoanalytical angle--one that was established by Jean-Joseph Goux. In his book Freud, Marx: economie et symbolique (1973), Goux compares Marx's genealogy of the form with Freud's genealogy of the Oedipus complex. As is well known, Marx's model distinguishes four stages in a process that leads to the form, but for Goux it is particularly important what happens on the final stage. Here, Marx claims, a 'particular commodity, with whose bodily form the equivalent form is [...] socially identified, [...] becomes the commodity, or serves as money'. (7) And, as he goes on to explain, for no apparent reason it was the precious metal of gold which took over this 'social function' of playing 'within the world of commodities the part of the universal equivalent'. (8) According to Goux, this very function of general equivalent is also present in Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex with regard to the social role played by the father: 'The father is the general equivalent of subjects, in the same way that gold is the general equivalent of products'. (9) More recently, in his book Frivolite de la valeur (2000), Goux has continued to examine the connection between the rise of the Freudian father and the rise of the form. Setting out from a variety of observations--such as the Ancient Greek notion of nomisma, which refers back to the law (nomos), or Aristotle's comparison between and the judge--Goux emphasises that implies a principle of unity, of centrality and of authority. …

Poetry, Potlatch and the Site: Arturo Carrera's Estación Pringles

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Unless otherwise attributed, all translations are my own. 2 See Ricardo Strafacce's Strafacce, Ricardo. 2008. Osvaldo Lamborghini, una biografía, Buenos Aires: Mansalva. [Google Scholar] Osvaldo Lamborghini, una biografía (2008) for documentation of Carrera's collaboration with Lamborghini. Originally written in 1981, El Palacio de los Aplausos (o el suelo del sentido) was first published in 2002, by the press Beatriz Viterbo. The plays produced by the puppet troupe, whose name was El escándalo de la serpentina, are compiled in a text titled Retrato de un albañil adolescente & Telones zurcidos para títeres con himen, first published in 1988. 3 Neither Escrito con un nictógrafo nor Momento de simetría are paginated. 4 There is a good English-language version of this text at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.htm. 5 See Jacques Derrida's Derrida, Jacques. 1987. From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve. Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass 251–77. Chicago: U of Chicago P. [Google Scholar] ‘From Restricted to General Economy’ for a brilliant exposition of the concepts of ‘restricted’ and ‘general’ in Bataille's work. 6 See Jean-Joseph Goux's 1968 text ‘Marx and the Inscription of Labour’ for a thorough examination of this homology as it was understood in Carrera's theoretical milieu. 7 Besides Foucault, see Charles Taylor's Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. [Google Scholar] genealogical reconstruction of modern subjectivity in Sources of the Self. 8 Kate Jenckes Jenckes, Kate. 2007. Blind Witnessing and the Aneconomics of the Literary (in Arturo Carrera's Potlatch). American Comparative Literature Organization Annual Conference. Panel: Post-Literature. Puebla, Mexico. April 19–22, 2007. Personal copy. [Google Scholar] has also made note of Carrera's revision of Bataille. She writes, ‘Although he doesn't explicitly reject Bataille's understanding of the term, he does counterpose Bataille's use of the redemptive terms ‘sacrifice’ and ‘salvation’ with the fact of pain, which does not go away once closed symbolic economies are broken open or interrupted by the poetic inscription of “not-enduring, not having, not-knowing”’ (7). 9 See Luis Alberto Romero's Romero, Luis Alberto. 2003. La crisis argentina: una mirada al siglo XX, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. [Google Scholar] La crisis argentina. Una mirada al siglo XX (2003), for an excellent, concise account of the economic crisis and its social repercussions. Also, see David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2004), which places Argentina's embrace of orthodox economic policies into relief against other such experiments throughout the world. 10 See Broken Promises, edited by Edward Epstein and David Pion-Berlin Epstein, Edward and Pion Berlin, David, eds. 2006. Broken Promises: The Argentine Crisis and Argentine Democracy, Lanham, MA: Lexington Books. [Google Scholar], for studies of these and other new social phenomena in Argentina. 11 See Giunta's Giunta, Andrea. 2007. Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties, Trans. Peter Kahn Durham: Duke UP. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties for an excellent discussion of Tucumán Arde. 12 Proyecto Venus Proyecto Venus. http://proyectov.org/venus2/ [accessed 20 April 2010]. [Google Scholar] ceased operating in 2006, though its website (http://proyectov.org/venus2/) remains accessible. On Eloísa Cartonera, see the project's website (http://www.eloisacartonera.com.ar) and also my own ‘New Media, Cardboard, and Community in Contemporary Buenos Aires.’ Epplin, Craig. 2007. New Media, Cardboard, and Community in Contemporary Buenos Aires. Hispanic Review, 75(4): 385–98. [Google Scholar] 13 Carrera has traced the gendered practice of declamation in Latin America back to the early twentieth century. ‘La declamación,’ he writes, ‘alcanzó un momento culminante durante el período de la poesía modernista en toda Latinoamérica y en España. Tuvo una diva central que la impuso y la puso de moda y hasta creó escuelas de declamación en todo el continente latinoamericano: Berta Singerman – amiga de los poetas más importantes de su época: Lorca, Neruda, Mistral, Storni, Ibarbourou’ (‘Declamation reached its culmination during the modernista period in Latin America and Spain. It had a principal diva who imposed it and made it fashionable, and who even founded declamation schools across the continent of Latin America: Berta Singerman – friend of the most important poets of her age: Lorca, Neruda, Mistral, Storni, Ibarbourou’; ‘De corazón’). 14 The problem of expertise in contemporary society has been the object of numerous studies. To mention just one, Rethinking Expertise by Harry Collins and Robert Evans (2007 Collins, Harry and Evans, Robert. 2007. Rethinking Expertise, Chicago: U of Chicago P. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), offers a useful typology of expertise with regard to scientific knowledge.

The Unworkable Interface

The Unworkable Interface Alexander R. Galloway (bio) I. Interface as Method Interfaces are back, or Perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit, from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other has, since the 1980s and 1990s, returned to center stage in the discourse around culture and media. The catoptrics of the society of the spectacle is now the dioptrics of the society of control. Reflective surfaces have been overthrown by transparent thresholds. The metal detector arch, or the graphics frustum, or the Unix socket—these are the new emblems of the age. Windows, doors, airport gates, and other thresholds are those transparent devices that achieve more the less they do: for every moment of virtuosic immersion and connectivity, for every moment of volumetric delivery, of inopacity, the threshold becomes one notch more invisible, one notch more inoperable. As technology, the more a dioptric device erases the traces of its own functioning (in actually delivering the thing represented beyond), the more it succeeds in its functional mandate; yet this very achievement undercuts the ultimate goal: the more intuitive a device becomes, the more it risks falling out of media altogether, becoming as naturalized as air or as common as dirt. To succeed, then, is at best self-deception and at worst self-annihilation. One must work hard to cast the glow of unwork. Operability engenders inoperability. Curiously this is not a chronological, spatial, or even semiotic relation. It is primarily a systemic relation, as Michel Serres rightly observed in his meditation on functional “alongsidedness”: “Systems work because they don’t work. Non-functionality remains essential for functionality. This can be formalized: pretend there are two stations exchanging messages through a channel. If the exchange succeeds—if it is perfect, optimal, immediate—then the relation erases itself. But if the relation remains there, if it exists, it’s because the exchange has failed. It is nothing but mediation. The relation is a non-relation.”1 Thus since Plato, we have [End Page 931] been wrestling with the grand choice: (1) mediation as the process of imminent if not immediate realization of the other (and thus at the same time the self), or (2) as Serres’ dialectal position suggests, mediation as the irreducible disintegration of self and other into contradiction.2 Representation is either clear or complicated, either inherent or extrinsic, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or imminently interpretable. In short, either Iris or Hermes. Without wishing to upend this neat and tidy formulation, it is still useful to focus on the contemporary moment to see if something slightly different is going on, or, at the very least to “prove” the seemingly already known through close analysis of some actual cultural artifacts. First though, I would like to insinuate a brief prefatory announcement on methodology. To the extent that the present project is allegorical in nature, it might be useful to, as it were, subtend the process of allegorical reading in the age of ludic capitalism with some elaboration as to how or why it might be possible to perform such a reading in the first place. In former times, it was generally passable to appeal to some legitimizing methodological foundation—usually Marx or Freud or some combination thereof—in order to prove the efficacy, and indeed the political potency, of one’s critical maneuverings. This is not to suggest that those sources are no longer viable, quite the opposite, since power typically grows with claims of obsolescence; even today Marx’s death drive persists under the pseudonyms of Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, or McKenzie Wark, just as a generation ago it persisted under Jean-Joseph Goux or Guy Debord. Yet somehow today the unfashionable sheen, and indeed perceived illegitimacy, of the critical tradition inherited from the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, with Marx and Freud standing as two key figures in this tradition but certainly not encompassing all of it, makes it difficult to rally around the red flag of desire in the same way as before. Today the form of Marxism in common circulation is still the antiseptic one invented a generation ago...

Common cents: situating money in time and place

This paper engages with a wide range of social theories to argue for a more nuanced understanding of money that is attuned to its spatial and scalar dimensions. The paper begins with a brief overview of modernist and postmodernist accounts, including the works of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux. These theories have provided a useful corrective to neoclassical economic accounts that distil the economic from society and culture, but they reinforce an understanding of money that is homogenizing, in that it is said to annihilate space by time. By contrast, network theories of money, which are reviewed in the following section of this paper, offer a more contextualized understanding of money's embeddedness in social relations, in particular vis-à-vis the trust that is invested in money forms and institutions that help to knit together the networks through which money circulates. The spatial dynamics of monetary circulation are intrinsic to this model, but there is little sense of the geopolitical dimensions of money's role in the territorialization of space. The studies of money that are reviewed in the penultimate section of this paper begin to address the dimensions of power at work in money's production and circulation, largely in terms of the rise of the state and national currencies, with particular attention to the particularities of money forms. As I argue in the conclusion to this paper, these various epistemological approaches are not easily reconciled. But I suggest that the aim should not be to resolve the paradoxes that emerge, but to foreground them. In so doing, not only will it be possible to think more carefully about the scales through which money circulates and which it helps to produce and reproduce, but to invest our understanding of money with a little more life and dynamism.

King Arthur and the Myth of History by Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (review)

LAURIE A. PINKE and MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN, King Arthur and the Myth of History. Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2004. Pp. 262. ISBN: 0-8130-2733-0. $59.95. King Arthur and the Myth of History is a well-researched and theoretically sophisticated work that examines how the figure of King Arthur has been appropriated and manipulated 'historically.' Indeed, one of the book's key strengths is its deft treatment of both history-writing and historicism: Finke and Shichtman deal not only with responses to events produced within particular cultural moments by those identifying themselves as writers of'histories' or 'chronicles,' but also with the critical discourse of historicism and the 'production' of Arthurian history. The authors contend that Arthur has frequently been used as 'a potent, but empty, social signifier to which meaning could be attached that served to legitimate particular forms of political authority and cultural imperialism' (p. 2). As they move from the medieval to the modern period, they make their case by means of a pyramid-like organizational structure that allows them to focus on three major periods of cultural crisis. The base of the pyramid (Chapters 1-4) examines the explosion of interest in the Arthurian legend that occurred with the Norman colonization of England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In separate chapters, the authors discuss the Arthurian portions of William of Malmesbury's. Gesta Regum Anglorum, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannic, Wace's Roman de Brut, and Lagamon's Brut. Building on this foundation, Finke and Shichtman move on and up to the fifteenth century and the Wars of the Roses to address John Hardyng's Chronicle and Caxton's print of Malory's Morte Darthur. Finally, at the top of the pyramid, they bring their discussion of history and historicism into the twentieth century by examining the intersection of Arthurian and Nazi ideals in Jean-Michel Angebert's The Occult and the Third Reich: The Mystical Origins of Nazism and the Search for the Holy Grail and Trevor Ravenscroft's Spear of Destiny: The Occult Power Behind the Spear which Pierced the Side of Christ. Another strength of this book is its blend of solid historical contextualization with innovative theoretical literary analyses. To show how the figure of Arthur functions as 'symbolic capital' in various texts at different times, Finke and Shichtman make effective use of theoretical frameworks offered by Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Joseph Goux, and a number of postcolonial theorists. Some of their most interesting arguments draw upon the work of Benedict Anderson, particularly his theorization in Imagined Communities of the rise of nationalism-a concept they critique and modify to demonstrate the complex formation of individual and collective identities these 'histories' of King Arthur enact. Their use of theory is sophisticated yet judicious; it never threatens to overwhelm or diminish the important historically-grounded work that is the book's core. In fact, the first four chapters are so thorough in their description of the historical context in which the early Arthurian chronicles were written-and so meticulous in their summary of recent critical thinking about the agendas behind the composition and dedication of these texts-that King Arthur and the Myth History could be said to offer a history of Arthurian historicism. It is, however, much more than this. The careful construction of this groundwork allows the authors to paint a larger and more complex picture of how Arthur has been used historically than would otherwise be the case. The first chapter offers a prime example: here the authors show how the story of a fifth- or sixth-century ruler came to be explosively popular in the twelfth century. Finke and Shichtman begin their investigation with an analysis of William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum, a work many historians and critics have taken at 'face value,' especially in comparison with the work of his near-contemporary Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Brittanie is almost universally hailed as at once fraudulent, propagandistic, and hugely entertaining. …

The Enigma of gift and sacrifice

What does it mean to give a gift? In this timely collection, distinguished anthropologists-Maurice Godelier, George Marcus, Stephen Tyler-and philosophers-Mark C. Taylor, John D. Caputo, Jean-Joseph Goux and Adriaan Peperzak, explore an enigma that has disturbed contemporary philosophers from Marcel Mauss to Jacques Derrida. The essays included in the volume: Some Things You Give, Some Things You Sell, But Some Things You Must Keep for Yourselves: What Mauss Did Not Say about Sacred Objects by Maurice Godelie. The Gift and Globalization: A Prolegomenon to the Anthropological Study of Contemporary Finance Capital and Its Mentalities by George Marcus Capitalizing (on) Gifting by Mark C. Taylor Even Steven or No Strings Attached by Stephen Tyler Mothering, Co-muni-cation and the Gifts of Language by Genevieve Vaughan The Time of Giving, the Time of Forgiving by John D. Caputo Seneca against Derrida: Gift and Alterity by Jean-Joseph Goux Giving by Adriaan Peperzak

Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought

Introduction Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood 1. Parameters of an ongoing crisis Barbara Cassin 2. Terror on the run Jean-Fancois Lyotard 3. Subversion and consensus: proletarians, women, artists Jean-Joseph Goux 4. Situations of current French thought: the end of 'The French Exception' Marc Auge 5. The terror of consensus Francoise Gaillard 6. Democracy and totalitarianism in contemporary French thought: neoliberalism, the Heidegger scandal and ethics in post-structuralism Philip R. Wood 7. Postmodernity and the politics of multiculturalism: the Lyotard-Habermas debate over social theory Mark Poster 8. Performative universalism and cultural diversity: French thought and American contexts Francoise Lionnet 9. Mission and limits of the Enlightenment Jean-Marie Apostolide s 10. The intellectual sublime: Zola as archetype of a cultural myth Susan Rubin Suleiman 11. Is the West the universal model for humanity? The Baruya of New Guinea between change and decay Maurice Godelier Reference matter Notes Index.

Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought. Edited by Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood. Stanford University Press. 1999. xi+222 pp.

Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought. Edited by Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood. Stanford University Press. 1999. xi+222 pp.

Memoires aristocratiques feminins: 1789-1848. By Henri Rossi. Paris, Champion, 1998. 545 pp.

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought. Edited by JEAN-JOSEPH GOUX AND PHILIP R. WOOD. Stanford University Press. 1999. xi + 222 pp. PAUL HEGARTY PAUL HEGARTY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume LIV, Issue 3, July 2000, Pages 377-a–377, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/LIV.3.377-a Published: 01 July 2000

Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought, edited by Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood

<i>Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought</i>, edited by Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood