Poststructuralist Research Articles

‘How to read conspiratorially, or the hatred of theory’

ABSTRACT The Covid pandemic reaction has made manifest a hidden hatred of theory on the part of the consensual elite, specifically the ability of anyone to make a theory that would tie together loose strands of thought and make sense out of an apparently chaotic world. This article examines how the Manifeste exposes how certain concepts dear to the political Left (such as solidarity and mass movements) were complicit in the human rights abuses which began in 2020, while also pointing out the concepts that have endured as powerful tools in the struggle, but which the anonymous author/s of the Manifeste did not assign to any one thinker (biopolitics, deconstruction, the metaphysics of ‘cool’, etc.). The Manifeste conspires with the silent texts of French theory from Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida to Rancière and Agamben, and along the way offers a new hermeneutical practice. This new way of reading seeks a commonality of experience, a privileging of the wink over the ‘nudge’. The Manifeste asks us to find common cause with others who know how to read what is happening, to break with hierarchical institutions and prefabricated identities; in short it asks us to love theory again.

Спекулятивный реализм для философских «миллениалов»

In this article I discuss the prospective generation of philosophers born in the mid-80s and early 90s of the last century. I associate it with the newest philosophical movement, “speculative realism.” The main thesis of this article: the named generation of philosophers, with the help of the anti-correlationist thesis of speculative realism, is trying to update the ontology of difference associated with French theory and neo-Marxism. I also compare the sociological concept of the millennial generation with the specified generation of philosophers who popularize speculative realism.

Civil nationalism in Jalal Maleksha's book "The Chain of Captive"Words

Civil . In this study, civil nationalism is reflected as a prominent feature in Maleksha's poetryIt is based on the principles of citizenship, .n a tionalism is one of the types of nationalism coexistence, common interests, and the will of human, wherever they want to live. Whatever The poet's civilized It is important to be within a particular country. . language he speaks Although the poet lived in a attitude alongside national values can be seen in his poems. However, the nation has suffered many times country where many other nations live in. because of them. But in many places in his book, the poet appears to be a civilized person and He makes his human and poetic feelings a coolness for his mind and shows puts us a beautiful example of humanity aside hatred. But Maleksha .Nationalism is the least mentioned and rarely seen in Kurdish literature has his fingerprints on the field. Maleksha may have been known as a country or ethnic poet from the readers. But Maleksha has not forgotten civilization. In this regard, he has shown his poetic power. Therefore, based on the French theory of "will to live together" the poet's poems are analyzed, the aim is to show the poet's nationalist feelings, whether the poet's feelings of civil nationalism are evident in his poems He is a well-known ethnic poet.

Maurice Blanchot’s troubling geography: Neutralizing key spatial and temporal concepts in the wake of deconstruction

In dialogue with recent studies that have sought to foreground the negative and the abyssal in human geography and that have struggled in vain to prevent their foreclosure, we introduce the work of the French theorist Maurice Blanchot, whose challenging and thought-provoking writings remain largely unknown within our discipline despite their significance for deconstructing geography’s conceptual architecture. After explicating Blanchot’s neutralization of the problem of negativity and positivity, the paper brings Blanchot’s neutral writings to bear on three areas of contemporary geographical concern: the trouble with subjectivity and identity; the unhinging of space and time; and the disaster of writing.

Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by Bernard Geoghegan (review)

Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by Bernard Geoghegan (review)

보편을 다시 무대에 올리며, 보편의 상 아래에서 말하기 - ‘탈진실’ 시대 진리 개념의 포스트-구조주의적 재구성을 위한 정치철학적 시론 -

The present study takes the politico-philosophical approach of reconstructing the concepts of truth and the universal in a poststructuralist way in order to criticize our present situation of post-truth. This approach takes the following four steps. First, beyond simply diagnosing the present post-truth situation, it also critically analyzes the various discourses that criticize the post-truth situation. The conclusion of this critical diagnosis is that the discourses which criticize the present post-truth situation treat truth in a cognitivist way in accordance with the propositional conception of truth, which is based on a superficial misunderstanding of Anglophone analytic philosophy. Second, in order to criticize these attempts to reduce truth to the dimension of the true, it reconstructs the post-structuralist triangle of truth-history-subject based on French historical epistemology, i.e. the post-structuralist conception of truth. The post-structuralist conception of truth does not reduce truth to a dimension of the true but elevates it to the dimension of truth itself. Third, it defines this post-structuralist triangle of truthhistory-subject as the triangle of the universal, based on the post structuralist philosopher Étienne Balibar’s reflections on the universal. Through an analysis of the history of philosophy, Balibar deduces three qualities of universality - equivocal universality, conflictual universality, universality as translation - from the thoughts of Spinoza-Wittgenstein, Hegel-Marx, Quine-Benjamin. Fourth, in order to address the objection that can be raised against the post-structuralist conception of truth and the universal, which is the problem of the arbitrariness of the standards for truth and the universal, it criticizes the Deleuze-Nietzschean reflection on the courage of the false, based on Balibar’s philosophy of actualityas- structure. Lastly, it reflects on how truth and the universal ought to be thought of from the standpoint of the intellectuals in this post-truth situation. In the end, the aim of this article is to provide a theoretical key to overcoming our current post-truth situation, by thinking about truth and the universal in a different way from current discourses.

Marina Warner’s Inventory of A Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir. From Memoir to Filiation Narrative

Marina Warner’s Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021) is her second work belonging to the genre of life writing, more particularly the memoir. She had already written a biography, The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz’u-Hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835-1980, about a Chinese empress in 1972, but her memoir is more personal, rather focused on her parents’ marriage, life itineraries and travels through Italy, England and Egypt during and after WWII. Interestingly, many characteristics of her memoir fit with another life writing genre, identified by the French theorist Dominique Viart in the eighties as the ‘filiation narrative,’ initially in reference to French fiction of the same period. The filiation narrative focuses on a self-reflexive search for parental images, reconstructing the mother’s or father’s life through the excavation of documentation and archives, as well as speculation. This article will attempt to show how such thematic and structural features of the filiation narrative as ‘archeological’ narration, the use of archival documents and objects to restore a parent’s ‘lost’ life and, most importantly, the metabiographical aspect of the ‘enterprise’ are reflected, in various degrees, in Warner’s memoir, making it waver between fiction and non-fiction. These same features may thus pave the way for the English counterpart of the French ‘récit de filiation’ and build a pertinent generic continuity between both memoir and filiation narrative.

Blurring Boundaries: Real and Hyperreal Elements in Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World

The academic paper centers on evaluating the real and hyperreal elements in the German novel Measuring the World(2005) written by Daniel Kehlmann. The novel is set in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during the Enlightenment era, and bears a resemblance of the prominent figures of real time, namely the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and the geographer Alexander von Humboldtof the same centuries. The historical description of these prominent figures undergoes alteration, and the writer adds several dramatic events to it. This research paper attempts to analyse the theory of hyperreality by the French theorist Jean Baudrillard. The paper also highlights the concept of Simulation that Kehlmann employs in altering the reality with representations. In further, the paper aims to provide an understanding of the examination of narration, character development, and exaggerated events exploring the multiple-layered narrative.

프랑스 이론과 사이버네틱스

This paper aims to identify the relationship between cybernetics and the post-war French philosophies or theories known and embraced as structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. Recent research has shown that cybernetics was closely associated with Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, which was the cool of the new French theory, and that poststructuralism or postmodernism was a response to the technologies of control represented by cybernetics. From this perspective, the misconceptions and prejudices surrounding French theory must be confronted with an understanding of the historical context that gave rise to the phenomenon of postmodernism. This paper looks at French theory as an intellectual movement that emerged out of the reflection on cybernetic technologies in the post-war period centred on the Maginot Line and revisits its theoretical context through the keyword cybernetics. This new examination will allow us to rewrite the genealogy of French theories that emerged after 1950 as a response to cybernetics, whether postmodernism is interpreted as a cultural logic of late capitalism, as an extension of modernism, or as a new epistemology inevitably resulting from the decline of modernity. From this perspective, this paper argues that French theory and its effect, postmodernism, should not be buried in the annals of history as relics of a bygone era but should be recognized as a historical legacy shaping our present reality and should be re-examined.

Code: From Information Theory to French Theory

Code: From Information Theory to French Theory

Chinoiserie and The (Un)staging of French Hegelianism

China and Maoism were intertwined with the fate of French Hegelianism due to Louis Althusser’s ceaseless effort of bundling them with his anti-Hegelian project. Althusser reinvented Hegelianism as a matrix of One to challenge Western metaphysical tradition, which laid the ground for the continuous involvement between China/Maoism and the core concerns of contemporary French theory, namely differences, anti-determination, anti-reductivism, anti-essentialism, and anti-teleology. Althusser harnessed the complexity of revolutionary China and Maoist difference and unevenness to remake a Marxism of difference and a non-teleological imagination of history; paradoxically, he constrained their momentum at least in the period of For Marx and Reading Capital.

Americanization of French Theory and the Rise of “Chinese Postism”

Chinese Postism refers to Chinese versions of poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism, three major western theoretical trends prefixed with “post.” Chinese Postism is largely retranslations of English translations (and interpretations) of French theories of poststructuralism and postmodernism, as well as postcolonialism as American appropriation of French theories. Revisiting the French- American-Chinese journey of theory may help uncover the broader political and ideological changes underlying the intellectual and academic trends.

A FOUCAULTIAN READING OF RESISTANCE IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S NOVEL "THINGS FALL APART "

The field of cultural, human and literature has taken the entire study of the concept of resistance, as this concept is linked to the French theorist Michel Foucault. He asserts that power is what caused us to be in the place where we are now. There is no separation between resistance and power, both come through the other. Chinua Achebe is the greatest and most famous writer in African literature. He attempts to find an escape from the colonial turn that invaded African literature, The goal of Achebe's writings is to enable the African people to have pride in their history. His novel "Things Fall Apart" focused on showing the tragic situation of the people of Africa, the impact of colonialism on Africa, its history and culture, and how the colonialists tried to obliterate the African identity. The study aims to analyze the novel "Things Fall Apart" in the light of the Foucauldian concept of resistance and how the characters demonstrated the rejection of colonialism and its resistance in the novel.

O alianță literară. De la critica biografică la întoarcerea autorului

In the milieu of interwar Romanian modernism, Șerban Cioculescu showed a particular interest in the making of literary biographies, which in the post-war decades resulted in a self-styled version of biographical criticism. This article follows the avatars of a heated debate developed in 1970-‘80s around the life and works of writer Mateiu I. Caragiale, involving, on the one hand, Alexandru George, Alexandru Paleologu, and N. Steinhardt, and on the other, Șerban Cioculescu and Eugen Simion. While the former group claims a textual hermeneutics devoid of biographical speculation, the latter supports the revival of biography-based analysis. Eugen Simion finds in Șerban Cioculescu’s approach a valuable ally, while preparing his book Întoarcerea autorului (The Return of the Author, 1981), to defy the mainstream anti-biographical orientation of Romanian criticism, and reintroduce, in the spirit of French theory (like Jean Starobinski or Serge Doubrovsky’s), the figure of the author in text interpretation.

MECHANISMS OF THE CULTURAL TRANSFER IN TRANSLATION

The article is the first attempt to reveal the mechanisms of “the cultural transfer” (the notion was first introduced by the French theorist M. Espagne) of the Armenian and Russian translations of Charles Dickens’s novels. Evidently, the Armenian translations of the novels were transferred and interpreted especially from the beginning of the 1880s, in Shushi (1890-91), Tiflis (different publications in the 1890s), Constantinople (1928), Baku (1898), Athens (1928), Cairo (1892), etc. The Armenian versions of Dickens’s creativity were either paraphrased or translated from the original language or from Russian as an intermediary language. The article outlines theoretical and practical issues related to the specifics of the artistic translation through the paradigm of cultural transfer. Being at the crossroads of West and East the Armenian national culture is characterized as a unique manifestation of cultural transmission and a pivotal basis of socio-cultural and geopolitical usus. The article sketches the situation of “cultural transfer” of Charles Dickens’s novels whose literary reputation was established in the Russian literary field, that consequently made an influence on Eastern Armenia.

:Code: From Information Theory to French Theory

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Authorial Lives and Deaths: Revisiting Perumal Murugan’s Literary Death and Afterlives

Abstract Tamil writer Perumal Murugan announced his authorial death on Facebook in January 2015. The events that led to this moment and what followed highlight the contentious relationship between authorship and censorship. This paper positions itself within the field of literary authorship studies. While mid-twentieth-century French theory had engaged with notions of authorial death and author-as-victim, witnessing Murugan’s actions following the call for a social boycott of his novel, One Part Woman, in 2014, brought back to life theory that had long been buried. Explaining his experiences in light of Roland Barthes’s and Michel Foucault’s treatises on authorship, this paper reads Murugan’s literary suicide and writings as a resurrection that creatively challenges attempts to shun his critical fiction. His example highlights how a socio-political environment that is suspicious of plurality and democracy renders the relations among the author, the reader, the text, and the context as unstable.

The Nonviolently Violent God: Humanity’s Peace, Divine Violence, and Advent Hope

Peace-talk is incoherent because we do not have one definition of the word “peace.” Everyone has different understandings of this term, and thus we cannot help but selfishly impose our understandings of peace onto someone else’s understandings of peace. With the help of Augustine of Hippo, we underscore this issue through an analysis of disordered desire; in addition, with the help of French theorist René Girard and his theory of mimesis (which very much has an Augustinian flavor in terms of its low theological anthropology), we emphasize how humanity cannot help but disorder even the noblest of endeavors such as just peacemaking. Therefore, this essay argues that humanity’s peace presents a mimetical trap that needs to be broken from above via a divine disruption that is simultaneously violent and nonviolent.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory

Assembling a distinctive genealogy of cybernetic thought situated in relation to Progressive Era technocracy, industrial capitalism, (de)colonial relations, and eugenic machinery, Code uncovers the vital interdependence of informatics, the humanities, and the human sciences in the 20th century. Rather than figuring cybernetics as emerging from Second World War military technologies and post-war digital computing, Code argues that liberal technocrats’ inter-war visions of social welfare delivered via ‘neutral’ communication techniques shaped the informatic interventions of both the Second World War and the Cold War. Tracing how an organizing concept of code linked the work of diverse structurally-minded thinkers, such as Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs the cybernetic apparatus that spawned new fields, including structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology – and grapples with the unfolding implications of such socio-technical dynamics for 21st-century critical theory, digital media, and data analytics.

Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by Bernard D. Geoghegan (review)

Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by Bernard D. Geoghegan (review)