Late Essays Research Articles

Sociohistorical Self-Choreography: A Second Dance with Castoriadis

Abstract Twentieth-century Greco-French philosopher, economist, psychoanalyst and activist Cornelius Castoriadis offers a creative new conception of imagination that is uniquely promising for social justice. Though it has been argued that this conception has one fatal flaw, the latter has recently been resolved through a creative dialogue with dance. The present article fleshes out this philosophical-dancing dialogue further, revealing a deeper layer of creative dialogue therein, namely between Castoriadis’ account of time and choreography. To wit, he reconceives time as the self-choreography of the sociohistorical, in which performance the sociohistorical plays two dancing roles simultaneously, both choreographer and choreographed dancer. More precisely, as interpreted by Castoriadis in a late essay, the creation and emergence of forms in time consists of a poetic “scansion” or “scanning” of time. Thus, the sociohistorical is both choreographer and dancer, poet and reader, reinterpreting the poetic text of time as the music for its evolving dance.

The Essay in Space and Time: A Conversation with Filmmaker Mark Cousins

Questions in an interview with United Kingdom filmmaker Mark Cousins concern the formal properties and development of nonfiction films taking the shape of essays, rather than documentaries. The relationship between Orson Welles’s films and his lifelong habit of drawing is the subject of Cousin’s latest essay film, The Eyes of Orson Welles. As the interview progresses, the subject shifts to relationships among the arts and the creative process.

Historicizing the Theorization of Race: A Nineteenth-Century Story

In this essay, I bring together Victorian studies and race studies in an effort to overturn what has come to be the most familiar form of racial analysis in contemporary culture: the notion that race is "constructed," that it operates by aligning visible marks of difference with a shifting—and hence contingent—series of meanings and associations. I argue that the very concept of an arbitrary, constructed racial sign might itself have a history. Rather than presuming that skin functions as the default sign of racial difference and then tracing a given set of meanings that might be appended to that sign, I open my analysis by noting that in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, skin suddenly came to be privileged as the primary sign of racial identity. Immanuel Kant has long been identified as the first prominent European thinker to single out skin color in this way, and, as a consequence, I examine his essay on the topic, "On the Use of Teleological Principles for Philosophy" (1788). Read in the context of his late essay on the relationship between philosophy and medicine in The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant's emphasis on skin color suddenly becomes legible in the light of shifting medical paradigms of the human body. Racial constructionism's rhetoric of otherness obscures the degree to which perceiving race involves, for better or for worse, experiencing individuals' likeness to one another rather than their difference. Kant's racial skin turns likeness from an idea that must be discovered over time to something legible instantly.

William Carlos Williams's The Great American Novel

William Carlos Williams was first of all a writer-not a poet, essayist, or novelist. Life isn't any more poetry than prose, he mused in a late essay,' looking back on a career that included over twenty collections of poems and an equal number of books in prose. During the Twenties, years of personal and artistic ferment for Williams, he wrote seven books of prose to one of poetry. His interest in the experimental, the new as a means of communicating, is nowhere more evident than in The Great American Novel (1923). Williams' experiments with the reciprocity between poetry and prose would culminate in Paterson, the five-book epic poem appearing between 1943 and 1958. But already in the Twenties he was an eager critic of contemporary proseHemingway, Ford, McAlmon, Stein, Joyce, Anderson. By 1923 he had voiced dissatisfaction with his own first prose collection, Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920): fault is their dislocation of sense, often complete.2 He disliked the weak structure of the improvisations, the incomplete transitions; but he admired the dominant themes in the book: began there and then to revalue experience, to understand what I was at. In Spring and All (1923) Williams continued his search for an effective mode, this time a reasonably conventional prose mixed with poems. That he was fascinated by the differences in poetry and prose is clear from his many distinctions between the two. His interest in prose as a viable-a forceful-writing form had been evident as early as 1921 when he wrote admiringly of the work of James Joyce,

John Webster on Dogmatics and Ethics

AbstractFrom his earliest published writing Webster identified the moral life as the horizon of dogmatic enquiry, and his last‐published work offers a subtle clarification of how dogmatics relates to ethics. The principle ‘action follows being’ governs both the relation of the two sub‐disciplines and the internal logic of each. As theology is a knowledge acquired not only speculatively but also practically, dogmatics must look forward and practical theology look back. Their interaction covers the whole range of theological topics. It is a fittingly Chalcedonian conception stressing the duality of dogmatics and ethics alongside their unity. While specialized dogmatics and ethics are legitimate, the two remain proximate, in a definite order of origin and derivation. The temptation of a de‐moralized theology equalled by that of a theology wrongly constructed on a moral a priori. In his late essays Webster presents worked examples of how dogmatics may handle moral questions without venturing into casuistic exploration of dilemmas. One essay, however, goes further, troublingly describing ‘mortification and vivification’ as the primary human acts of the regenerate state, a function that the tradition has always assigned to love.

Hidden Antinomies of Practical Reason, and Kant’s Religion of Hope

Abstract In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues that morality obliges us to believe in the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. I argue, however, that in two late essays - “The End of All Things” and “On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” - Kant provides moral counterarguments to that position: these beliefs undermine moral agency by giving rise to fanaticism or fatalism. Thus, I propose, the Kantian position on the justification of religious belief is ultimately antinomial. One ought, moreover, to understand Kant’s considered position concerning the immortality of the soul and the existence of God to be similar to that he proposes concerning the theoretical ideas of reason in the Appendix to the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason: they are necessary as regulative ideas guiding moral action, not endorsed or even postulated as propositions. In other words, they are subject matters not of belief, but of hope.

Dream a Little Dream of Not Me: The Natures of Emerson's Demonology

Dream a Little Dream of Not Me:The Natures of Emerson's Demonology Richard Hardack (bio) "God has made nothing without a crack except Reason." —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960-82, IV: 357) "There is a crack in every thing God has made." —Emerson, "Compensation" (1904, II: 107) Introduction Though it focuses partly on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson's "Demonology"—published in the North American Review in 1877, almost forty years after it was first delivered in lecture form—is not just contradiction, but the arcane inversions, doublings, and self-dismantlings of transcendentalism itself. Between many of Emerson's pronouncements falls this shadow of Demonology, which I treat as a key aspect of his theories and essays of experience—that is, those in which his contradictions are preeminent, unsettling, and thematic. If Emerson's transcendental pantheism is suffused with, or structured by, contradiction and doubling, "Demonology" is the essay that most fitfully "performs" those inversions; in which the double emerges as twin and negative; and in which polar opposites become both coterminous and sequential in any direction (and therefore almost never linear in exposition).1 Both as the essay and concept I focus on in this article, Demonology is not a tangent or coda to Emerson's work, but the cumulative residue of an attempt to codify that which resists his overarching theory that all forces, [End Page 329] processes and attributes of nature are consistent, explicable, rational, and ultimately commensurate. Both its problematic provenance as an essay revised while Emerson suffered from failing mental acuity, and the way its tenets resist formalization, have led most scholars to treat "Demonology," as an essay and concept, either as a digression or embarrassment.2 Critics of the day, however, seemed to realize that a protean Demonology was one of the definitive components of Emerson's pantheism: for example, Enoch Pond, an inveterate critic of Emersonian thought, warned in 1852 that "Pantheism… can assume any shape, can appear in any form, adopt any creed. … We wonder not that it begins to raise its demoniac front, boasts of numbers and threatens to swallow up everything which stands in its way" (131). I reassess "Demonology"—not just in spite of its inchoate status and troubled provenance, but in part because of it—as an overlooked encapsulation of many of Emerson's ulterior tenets and a capstone of his metaphysics. In Lacanian terms, the contradictory or seemingly anomalous elements of "Demonology" represent the necessary remainders or gaps in his work that allow Emerson to address nature, a scenario complicated by the fact that the subject of these remainders is remainders. In other words, the subject of the essay is, implicitly, the cause of its own fragmentary nature. In never entirely stable ways, the demonological for Emerson represents specific forces within nature, but is also immanent to the system of nature. I also attempt to counter the lingering perception of Emerson as both a rationalist and idealist. No consistent transcendentalism generates or allows for Emerson's inconsistent pronouncements, because the inconsistency precedes the pronouncements at the level of ontology. A negation of the negation, Emerson's Demonology does not emerge in the register of symbolic spiritual transcendence, nor as part of an uplifting imaginary vision, but as a dark, racialized, feminized, and materialized "real" limit on established conventions. Emerson's [End Page 330] exposition of nature's Demonology, both in the eponymous essay and throughout his writings, thereby corroborates some poststructuralist as well as transcendental postulates. Emerson's repeated emphasis on limitation, especially the limits of reason, bear some surprising affinities with Slavoj Žižek's formulation of the Lacanian Real, which is why Žižek offers a useful interpretative language for approaching "Demonology" in particular. I am not invoking any single framework to contextualize Demonology, but trying to tease out an internal logic of Emersonian negation that often is consonant with Lacanian theory. Though it might seem an odd referent for Emerson, Žižek's postulates regarding Lacanian inversion help explicate the reflexivity that haunts Emerson's thought. The Role of Demonology in Emerson's Work An early lecture published as a late essay, "Demonology" functions like an internal prophecy, or a...

In the Event of Deleuze

In the Event of Deleuze Ronald Bogue (bio) Gilles Deleuze Frida Beckman Reaktion Books www.reaktionbooks.co.uk 160 Pages; Print, $19.00 Biographies of philosophers are always tricky, given the uncertain relationship between philosophers' lives and their thought, but the problems are compounded when the philosopher lives a relatively uneventful life. Such is the case of Gilles Deleuze, who seldom traveled, founded no school, sought no followers, and promulgated no particular method. François Dosse, in his 2007 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, side-stepped the broad life/thought issue by simply shuttling between anecdotal narratives of the life and lengthy summaries of individual books. He addressed the difficulty of animating Deleuze's uneventful life by conducting multiple interviews with students, friends, and colleagues, which yielded a great deal of intriguing, if not always reliable, information. But he also enlivened his study considerably by including Guattari in his story—indeed, a great deal of the energy of Dosse's book comes from his accounts of Guattari's frenetic and incessant activism in psychoanalytic and psychiatric institutions, research collectives and political movements. In her contribution to Reaktion Books's Critical Lives Series, Frida Beckman, by contrast, focuses on Deleuze alone, and she makes the life-thought issue the center of her analysis. Hers is a "critical biography," she says, "not the kind of biography based on interviews with friends and family intended to unbury all the details of a writer's life, but rather a critical effort that endeavours to illuminate some fruitful dialogues between Deleuze's life and work." The results of this effort are truly remarkable. In his literary studies, Deleuze repeatedly states that there can be no separation between writers' lives and their works, but he also insists that great writers never create their works directly from their personal memories and experiences. Rather, they discover and give voice to impersonal affects and percepts immanent within their experience. Something similar holds true for philosophers, who seek to extract impersonal events from their personal lives and create concepts that are responsive to those events. The mode of individuation of an event is that of the anexact, neither a concrete individual (this circle) nor a universal idea (the circle), but a process of becoming (a circle: a becoming-circle or circling). With the anexact in mind, Beckman organizes her biography around five events: A Child (Deleuze's early life); An Apprenticeship (Deleuze's philosophical portraits of Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Spinoza leading up to Difference and Repetition [1968] and The Logic of Sense [1969]); A Friendship (Deleuze's collaborative writings with Claire Parnet and Guattari and his book on Foucault); A Practice (Deleuze's works in the 1980s on Francis Bacon and cinema); and A Life (Deleuze's illness and his late essays "The Exhausted" and "Immanence: A Life"). Though these chapters demarcate a chronological sequence, Beckman remains true to the floating, non-chronological time of the event, tracing within each section transverse relations among various texts and occurrences across Deleuze's life. Her controlling concept in tracing these relations is the assemblage, which is an ad hoc collection of "forces, bodies, objects and territories . . . fueled by desire and with a particular function." Her proposal, thus, is that "if we approach Deleuze's biography in order to delineate how components of his life and work emerge and are part of larger assemblages with collective functions, then we may be able to provide an account of his life that is also, at least to some extent, illustrative of his philosophy." The child of right-wing parents, Deleuze grew up in the shadow of his older brother, who was enshrined by his parents when he died at the hands of the Nazis, leaving Deleuze in the position of the always not quite good enough son. No doubt this background contributed to Deleuze's lifelong antipathy to bourgeois pieties, but what Beckman emphasizes are the events that allowed Deleuze to escape that background, not those that might have constrained him. Crucial were his friendship with a young literature professor, his introduction to philosophy at the Lycée Carnot, and his interaction with such luminaries as Pierre Klossowski, Jean Paulhan...

C'était mieux avant! by Michel Serres

Reviewed by: C'était mieux avant! by Michel Serres Keith Moser Serres, Michel. C'était mieux avant! Pommier, 2017. ISBN 978-2-7465-1288-7. Pp. 96. In his latest essay, which the cover of the book identifies as another sequel to his commercially successful Petite Poucette (2012), Serres pokes fun at members of the older generation who cling to an idealized version of the past. Combatting the pervasive mentality that "c'était mieux avant" with cogent arguments deriving their force from empirical evidence, the transdisciplinary philosopher demystifies utopian representations of the past. With a strong dose of his biting, sarcastic wit, Serres implores the ever-growing segment of the population that he refers to as the"Grands-Papas Ronchons"to think a little harder about all the immense anguish that quotidian existence used to entail for our not-so-distant human ancestors (6). In this regard, Serres reminds the reader that modern homo sapiens are living longer lives than ever before. In addition to this drastic increase in life expectancy, Serres explains how modern medicine alleviates the chronic pain associated with certain medical conditions for which there was no cure in the past. Citing compelling statistics to support his claims, Serres also posits that we are living in an unprecedented era of relative peace. While carnage incessantly inundates our plethora of screens, the philosopher notes that violence linked to organized warfare is no longer one of the leading causes of mortality, for the first time ever. Serres decries the senseless violence perpetrated by terrorist groups, but he asserts that these deplorable acts of aggression cannot be compared to the"boucheries perpétuelles"that epitomize much of human history (9). In this vein, the philosopher juxtaposes the current period of "soixante-cinq ans de paix" to "ces guerres d'antan" that claimed the lives of millions of victims (8; 9). Moreover, in "La fée électricité," Serres mocks the intellectual myopia of those who obstinately refuse to admit how inventions like electricity, central heating and air, and [End Page 280] running water have enhanced the quality of human life (76). Although those who are familiar with Serres's prolific oeuvre will notice that he covers similar ground in earlier works, he successfully refines many of his previous theories by adding critical nuances and new wrinkles. For instance, Serres persuasively maintains that the situation of billions of women has improved vastly in the twenty-first century. Not only were women denied access to basic civil liberties including universal suffrage and the right to own property, but Serres also presents disconcerting historical data related to the prevalence of domestic abuse and sexual assault that frequently occurred with impunity (75). The philosopher is cognizant that many forms of gender discrimination still exist. Nonetheless, he implies that older women who yearn for the past have even less to be nostalgic about than men. C'était mieux avant! is a thought-provoking essay written by an atypical philosopher whose highly original works offer invaluable insights about the world in which the modern subject now lives. [End Page 281] Keith Moser Mississippi State University Copyright © 2018 American Association of Teachers of French

Like a Letter, You

Like a Letter, You is a collaborative investigation focused on the concept of ‘conversation as an object’. Originally recorded as part of a larger self-produced project titled hEar Pixels, this track manifests as an experimental soundbased reconfiguration of an original essay about handwritten correspondence: How might an analog essay be performed as a digital assemblage of sound? In what ways are the methods of a DJ tied to speech, literature, and dialog? The track is composed using a cut-and-paste process of ‘utterances’, which may be described as units of speech distinct from language that may be oral or written and are inevitably completed by a response[1] which inevitably forms a dialog. Further, these speech units may manifest through gestures associated with digital tools as a form of cultural production[2]. Like a Letter, You includes a reading of the essay aloud, snippets of informal spoken conversations between the authors, and musical bits generated with a touch-based audio mixing platform. In effect, Like a Letter, You embodies the concepts of writing, dialog, and gesture within the genre of sound literature, and it also speaks to the unpredictable nature of collaboration and human interaction.
 [1] BAKHTIN, Mikhail (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.[2] NOLAND, Carrie (2009). Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Georg Simmel and the “Relational Turn”. Contributions to the foundation of the Lebenssoziologie since Simmel

The first aim of the paper is an interpretation of Georg Simmel’s sociology in “relational terms” – i.e., under the categories of the “relational sociology”; it focuses, thus, to show how Simmel’s social theory and philosophy of culture fit for the construction of aLebensoziologie. Considering Simmel as a “relational sociologist” means to demonstrate how his contribution is decisive to the history of sociology, since he defines the “Wechselwirkung” (reciprocity, relational exchange) and itsformsas the very matter of the social sciences. Simmel represents the “relational turn” in the wide sociologicalmilieu. Since Simmel’s contribution, sociology attempted to consider and investigate social facts in terms of “relation” and reciprocity. The current sociological debate insists on considering Simmel as a “relational” sociologist in various declinations (coherent to Bourdieu’s social theory or to the social network analysis framework). In his late essays and books Simmel gives a “vitalist” accent to the analysis of social facts: the social is above all “social life”, according to the consolidated forms/contents dialectical model.Grundfragen der Soziologie. Individuum und Gesellschaftrepresents his last attempt to corroborate a sort of “sociology of life” (Lebenssoziologie). Even if this term does not explicitly appear in Simmel’s words, it summarizes his social and cultural theory - since the volumeSoziologie- and offers some key-concepts for the successive sociological debate.

HISTORY, LAW AND FREEDOM: F. W. MAITLAND IN CONTEXT

This article considers the intellectual development of the historian and jurist F. W. Maitland (1850–1906). Its focus is the development of his ideas about the importance of intermediate groups between the individual and the state. Maitland expounded these ideas in a dazzling series of late essays which became the wellspring of the tradition known as “political pluralism.” Yet, as this article shows, the same ideas also played a crucial role in Maitland's great works of legal and historical scholarship, including The History of English Law. If this is appreciated, then the liberal, Germanist and constitutionalist basis of Maitland's thought becomes clear. So too does Maitland's position as a “new” liberal thinker, committed to freedom and constitutionalism, but critical of individualism and parliamentary sovereignty. In short, it is only if Maitland's political essays are read alongside his works of history and law that either can really be understood.

HISTORY, LAW AND FREEDOM: F. W. MAITLAND IN CONTEXT

This article considers the intellectual development of the historian and jurist F. W. Maitland (1850–1906). Its focus is the development of his ideas about the importance of intermediate groups between the individual and the state. Maitland expounded these ideas in a dazzling series of late essays which became the wellspring of the tradition known as “political pluralism.” Yet, as this article shows, the same ideas also played a crucial role in Maitland's great works of legal and historical scholarship, includingThe History of English Law. If this is appreciated, then the liberal, Germanist and constitutionalist basis of Maitland's thought becomes clear. So too does Maitland's position as a “new” liberal thinker, committed to freedom and constitutionalism, but critical of individualism and parliamentary sovereignty. In short, it is only if Maitland's political essays are read alongside his works of history and law that either can really be understood.

Dress and a Fashioned Identity among Black South African Migrant Miners in the Mid-Twentieth Century

ABSTRACTThe degree to which the development of migrancy as a way of life for men in South Africa affected the ways in which people fashioned their identity through dress constitutes the core of this article. The history of the development and adaptation of particular forms of dress is traced, with variations considered, following Mikhail Bakhtin (Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), as speech/dress acts within specific speech/ dress genres. Black miners are shown to have adopted a tripartite set of identities in colonial and apartheid times; these are, as Achille Mbembe (On the Postcolony. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015) argues, interlocking rather than chronologically separate and sequenced. They included the “traditional”, associated with rural homes; the specifically ethnic, associated with performative mine spectacles; and the modern, manifested in the urbane returnee to the “homeland”. These three interchangeable identities traverse a period from the late 1800s to the present. Focusing (but not exclusively) on mid-twentieth-century miners from the eastern seaboard of South Africa and their beadwork—often considered as one of the main markers of ethnicity—it is argued that these dress genres, interwoven and changing, are part of their fashioning of a modern masculine identity. The archive used here is largely photographic, and so visual analysis and historical contextualisation are the methodological tools employed.

The Education of Philosophy

So far, there is no philosophy that one could learn. For where is it? Who has got it in his possession, and by what characteristics can it be recognized? One can only learn to philosophize.-Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Architectonic,A838/B866; quoted in UNESCO 1953:17Nel Noddings, the well-known philosopher of education and proponent of care ethics, worries that Foucault's approach to education is potentially damaging to educational practices and philosophizing because it calls into question the agency of subjects at precisely the moment that historically marginalized groups are beginning to experience their own subjective agency (Noddings 2007: 80-81). Though her argument is not addressed to Foucault alone, his work is implicitly included when she suggests that the so-called of the subject in postmodern philosophy means that subjectivity is no longer the constitutive basis of meaning, that subjects are now understood as constituted by multiple, fragmentary identities.1 If subjectivity is always constituted and fragmentary, and thus produced by forces beyond its control, she suggests, then autonomy and agency will ultimately be experienced as illusions. Marginalized groups, as a result, she thinks, will lose interest in pursuing autonomy and agency. An education in power technologies would be, therefore, an unwitting extension of hegemonic, marginalizing, and exclusionary endeavors.2 But I see no reason for her to limit the argument to marginalized groups. For its center is the thought that if one is educated to believe in the impossibility of individual autonomy, then one will forego the attempt to act autonomously. This paper questions the assumption here that education and educators can and should shape or mold students in such a direct manner, if at all. It will do so by sketching an important part of the intellectual history informing Foucault's own genealogical investigation into the emergence of such an assumption in a disciplinary society. This history leads directly to Georges Canguilhem, Foucault's elective master, his bon maitre. And in the relation between the writings of master and student, we find a different exemplification of education, namely, as a thoroughly dialogical and philosophical activity undertaken for the sake of freedom.3The book in which Noddings worries about the death of the subject, entitled Philosophy of Education, is intended primarily as a textbook for students of education. Though the chapters of the book treat diverse philosophical approaches to education, Noddings's title seems to suggest that there is such a thing as philosophy of education. This paper's title, by contrast, is meant to suggest that education would be better grasped as an activity pursued philosophically, rather than the object of a disciplinary subdivision within academic philosophy. Etymologically, philosophy is the love or friendship for wisdom, that is, the search for wisdom. While many other human activities and practices require education or training, not all make education central to the very practice itself as philosophy does. The best way to philosophize about education, I contend, would be to consider attempts at the education of philosophy. Rather than evaluate solely what philosophers have said or written about how to philosophize or think, I will consider how one philosopher endeavored to develop and transform methods and ideas found in another. I respond to Noddings's concerns, therefore, by focusing on Foucault's accounts of education and philosophy, framing these as critical continuations of Georges Canguilhem's own work as a philosopher concerned with education.Such an endeavor is authorized by Foucault's own late essays asserting the importance of Canguilhem's work for his own (Foucault 1991). Treating Canguilhem and Foucault together on education is important in its own right for a number of reasons: first, because it helps to correct widespread and mistaken perceptions about Canguilhem, that, for instance, he was a historian more than a philosopher or that his sole area of interest was medicine and the life sciences. …

Cascade of Remainders

In a very late essay on remains, one might say a throw away essay, Derrida doggedly tracks the relation of a certain desire to remains, linking it to sacrificial economy and to a hierarchical ontological order. If our concern is a thinking of desire as it pertains to remains, why should we not turn first, or perhaps exclusively, to Derrida's monumental works on the subject of remains, specifically Glas and Cinders, jettisoning the little-known essay we have not yet named? Certainly Derrida has said much in these well-known works about desire and remains, consumption and excretion, fire and ashes. So, why devote all one's attention, as we will do in this paper, to what might be said to be a morsel of an essay, which has remained largely unread and hence falls outside of Derrida commentary? The essay in question is his 2002 ‘Remains – the Master, or the Supplement of Infinity’, a homage to Charles Malamoud, a French ethnologist and scholar of Indian and Oriental religions whose work, especially his 1989 Cooking the World, was influential on Derrida's thinking concerning the ‘rhetorics of cannibalism’ and ‘eating the other’ and featured prominently in his seminars from 1989–1991 on the aforementioned themes. In ‘Remains – the Master’, a dense and rich essay, Derrida analogically links two vastly different cultures – the Brahmanic of India and the Greco-European – in terms of a ‘law of remainders’, which for both traditions, he claims, is an organizing principle of humans, gods, and the whole of the world. In his essay Derrida returns to or, more accurately, remains with a thinking of ‘the French word “reste”, the remnants [restance] of “reste”’, which, as Derrida notes, is ‘difficult to translate in an exhaustive or transparent manner,’ that is, ‘without remainder’ (2002, 41). However, what this paper will follow is the circulation of remainders in the Vedic tradition, as analysed by Derrida and Malamoud. In doing so, we can begin to not only translate the notion of Malamoud's ‘cascade de restes’ from one culture, logic, and idiom to another but understand how for Derrida this ritual downpour of remainders not only institutes a hierarchy of remainders but also produces ipseity.

The Master Trembles: Sacrifice, Hierarchy, and Ontology in Derrida's ‘Remain(s)’

What remains? Who remains? What of the remainder? In a complex, illuminating late essay, ‘Remain(s) – the Master, or the Supplement of Infinity’ (2002), Derrida conjoins the two registers of the philosophical and the ‘cultural’ in which the remainder, remains, and leftovers operate. An ‘analogy’ is drawn between two vastly different ‘cultures’ – the Greco-European and the Brahmanic of India – and their relationship to remains.

Hawthorne’s Picturesque at Home and Abroad

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE SPENT MANY YEARS SEARCHING FOR PICTURESQUE scenes in New England, England, Scotland, France, and Italy. His travel writings indicate that he followed conventional picturesque tourist routes and sought out popular destinations featuring ruins, cottages, tree-framed vistas, rugged terrain, and mixtures of heights, hues, and lighting. As an early participant in the nascent tourist industry in the northeastern United States in the 1830s, he acquired the techniques of picturesque viewing as well as the standardized idiom for translating scenes into notebook entries, sketches, and essays. (1) When he used these conventions in his domestic and foreign travels, he made tourism itself an explicit theme of his travel writing. His own sightseeing was modeled after English picturesque tourism, which had been based on late eighteenth-century aesthetic standards governing landscape painting and estate gardening. Hawthorne saw the English picturesque as an aristocratic mode of composition that was immensely appealing but in many ways at odds with an American ethos of social mobility: in his view, it privileged landscapes and standards of beauty produced by a hereditary landowning class and promoted the notion of a permanently poor class. His complicated relation to this aesthetic reflects his own ambivalence about English social stratification, and picturesque moments in his writing are often occasions to grapple with the powers and limitations of an American rhetoric of social mobility and economic promise. As both a domestic and foreign tourist, Hawthorne had to contend with the ideological underpinnings of this aesthetic even as he found it compelling. He often responded to this challenge by detaching the pictorial conventions of the picturesque from his representations of white, native-born American men. In his writings based on travels in the northeastern United States, his picturesque figures tend to be European immigrants presumably fixed in their lowly positions. In his writings based on European travels, he also posits himself as a detached outsider, free to enjoy an aesthetic derived from a class system not his own. By aligning certain features of the picturesque with Old World social hierarchy, Hawthorne effectively reinforces, by way of contrast, a positive vision of American social fluidity. Hawthorne offers one example of the various ways American writers and painters of his time embraced and revised an older English picturesque to articulate values they believed were distinctly American. But consistent with his understanding of the picturesque as a mode of composition that reveals its own operations, Hawthorne's picturesque ratifies American ideals as it questions the process of their making. This questioning is particularly dramatic in Chiefly About War Matters (1862), a late essay about a trip to Washington, D.C. and several Virginian battlefields during the Civil War. In this essay, the various modes of detachment that had enabled touristic pleasure in the face of derelict figures and scenes are no longer possible when he travels in the war-tom terrain of his own country. Not surprisingly, the picturesque conventions Hawthorne had previously linked to figures of Europeans and European immigrants (especially the Irish) emerge here in his description of fugitive slaves, reinforcing his alignment of this aesthetic with social stratification. But the picturesque also strikes him as surprisingly suited to the Confederate soldiers he encounters at a prison in Harper's Ferry. Unlike the fugitive slaves and European immigrants, these soldiers are both U.S.-born and white, and yet they seem to Hawthorne incapable of improvement. When he compares these soldiers to European peasants content with their lowly positions, this picturesqueness belies the assumption that social mobility is available to white native-born men. This use of picturesque conventions makes clear that Hawthorne's prior notions of social mobility have been the result of his own limited vantage point. …

Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle by James Henderson Collins II

Reviewed by: Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle by James Henderson Collins II Svetla Slaveva-Griffin James Henderson Collins II. Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 300. $74.00. ISBN 978–0-19–935859–5. This book examines the origin of the genre of philosophical and rhetorical protreptics (“turnings toward”) in the classical period. The topic is timely, despite the latest insurgent scholarly interest in physics as opposed to the traditionally predominant study of ethics. Although the question of recruitment strategies, as used by philosophy and rhetoric, carries in itself deep ethical connotations about the wares the two disciplines have to offer, Collins’ examination is not, nor does it intend to be, a philosophical analysis of their ethical nature. Instead, it falls—and markedly so—in the category of Quellenforschung and the theorization of literary genres such as F. Cairns’ Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh 1972) and M. M. Bakhtin’s Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin 1986). Bringing his predecessors’ course of study up to date, Collins applies to his investigation the trendy repertoire of intellectual culture as “a marketplace of ideas” wherein philosophic discourse becomes “philosophic advertising,” students are “prospective clients” and “consumers,” and philosophers and rhetoricians are “professional intellectuals” and “competitors” with “marketing campaigns” (ix–xiv). While the above branding may seem to some excessive, the book makes an original contribution to the study of the origin of philosophical (and, secondarily, of rhetorical) protreptics in fourth-century Athens. After a hefty introduction (hefty both in length and theoretical content), the book is divided into two parts, featuring the Platonic and the Isocratean sides of exhortative literature (parts 1 and 2, respectively), followed by an epilogue on the stabilization of the genre in Aristotle. For economy of space, I will highlight the main course of the argument in the individual parts, not in the individual chapters. The core argument is presented in the introduction. In it, Collins introduces what he refers to as “my theory of protreptic” (3) or “our more fluid model” (33) as configured against the background of the aforementioned studies and Aristotle’s rhetorical theory. Collins’ theory/model proposes that in the fourth century philosophy and rhetoric compete with each other to attract students as consumers of the different lifestyles they have to offer. While this competition gives the two disciplines an at first unique, and later a characteristic, protreptic bent (33), the protreptic genre itself does not mature in its fully-fledged form until Aristotle. The fluidity of the genre, Collins argues, is based on the interaction between external and internal levels of discourse. With time, this dynamic interaction, the author concludes, defines the form and content of the protreptic genre as found in Aristotle. The two parts of the main body illustrate the above thesis. Part 1 dissects the discursive levels of Plato’s dialogues into the categories of the intra- and extra-diegetic, the metaleptic, and the pro- and apotreptic. Collins correctly understands these levels as mutually embedded in the structure of the individual works, as, for example, in Plato’s Euthydemus. The dialogue aims at attracting and ultimately at converting an external audience to philosophy, in direct competition with the wares of the rhetoric-based model, by narrating its own internal “conversion” story. Part 2 turns to the Isocratean model. In comparison and [End Page 433] in competition with the Platonic model, the rhetorical model is more flexible, according to Collins. It stems from “lived experience” and allows the audience to voice its beliefs—beliefs that are only afterwards corrected by professional teachers. The epilogue examines the stabilization of the genre in Aristotle’s Protrepticus, now lost but indirectly documented through its rich reception. The organization of the work is unbalanced, and the inclusion of Aristotle in its title is an overstatement. The book is about the origin of the protreptic genre in the Platonic dialogue, with Isocrates’ speeches as a corollary, and Aristotle’s contribution as an aftermath. This imbalance, however, works well in proving the main thesis of the book: that, in the fourth century, there is no protreptic...

Ralph Waldo Emerson: the major prose

Upon its completion, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo (1971 2013) was hailed as a major achievement of scholarship and textual editing. Drawing from the ten volumes of the Collected Works, Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson have gathered some of Emerson s most memorable prose published during his lifetime and under his direct supervision. The editors have enhanced those selections with additional writings to produce the only anthology that represents in a single volume the full range of Emerson s written and spoken prose genres sermons, lectures, addresses, and essays that took on their public life in the pulpit or lecture hall, or on the printed page.Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose demonstrates the remarkable scope of Emerson s interests, from science, literature, art, philosophy, natural history, and religion to pressing social issues such as slavery and women s rights, to the character of his contemporaries, including Lincoln and Thoreau. Emerson s classic essays Nature, Self-Reliance, and Experience complement his less familiar but no less vital texts, including the deeply heterodox sermon on The Lord s Supper, which effectively announced his resignation from the ministry, and late essays on American Civilization, Character, and Works and Days. Edited according to the most rigorous modern standards, Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose provides an authoritative compendium of writings by one of America s most significant literary figures and public intellectuals.