Poststructuralist Research Articles

Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination by Sophie Vlacos (review)

Reviewed by: Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination by Sophie Vlacos Brian O’Keeffe Sophie Vlacos, Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, 232 pp. i In the preface to her book, Sophie Vlacos wonders why Ricoeur’s place within the order of the great literary theorists seems somehow in doubt. Certainly, few would dispute his renown as a philosopher. But in literary-theoretical contexts, Ricoeur often serves merely as a foil to more radical positions, as a person to whom reference is made when it proves necessary to acknowledge, en passant, something true about literature—to say why it is a precious stimulus to the imagination, and why literature’s own sense of imaginative possibility is valuable to re-envisioning the world itself. But then theory moves on, and affirmations of literature’s value become [End Page 364] harder to find in the midst of austere talk concerning its irresolvable ambiguity, such ambiguity apparently rendering all acts of reading wrong or “aberrant.” Theory brings us up short, confronts us with interpretive impasse, and proclaims that literature will ineluctably bring us to this, whatever are our desires as readers to read for the pleasures of an imaginative immersion in fictional worlds. Theory liked it this way, however. It liked the taxing rigor of interpretive reading doomed to a kind of failure. It preached, often in the teeth of stiff resistance to theory, the virtue of doing hard critical work at the coalface of texts that had become peculiarly forbidding to those who ventured to read them at all. This is a caricature. It caricatures literary studies during the age of High Theory, and it also presents a rather disobliging portrait of the interpretive approach of Paul de Man—my allusion to The Resistance to Theory will not, I trust, have gone unmissed. But that age has been declared over, and so perhaps one quick answer to Vlacos’s question about the place of Ricoeur in literary-theoretical contexts is that he simply had to wait it out. High Theory’s day is done, and we may now return to Ricoeur and affirm the value of reading literature: reading is an act of feeling, an imaginative feeling-into a fictional world; reading literature is good for our general cultivation, our Bildung; reading helps us make sense of the world and our place in it; literature is a creative activity, and it powerfully re-describes the world to us; it teaches readers to imagine themselves otherwise; it hones our sympathies and our empathies—these, the basic components of the specifically ethical imagination. One mentions ethics, and already there is another possible answer to Vlacos’s question, namely that Ricoeur had to wait for the “ethical turn” in literature and philosophy. In this respect, it is notable that Martha Nussbaum features prominently in Vlacos’s book: in the last section, which addresses Ricoeur in terms of the turn to ethics, and Nussbaum also provides the epigraph to Vlacos’s introduction. The quote, from Love’s Knowledge, is well-known: “After reading Derrida, and not Derrida alone, I feel a certain hunger for blood; for, that is, writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all” (1). We will get to Derrida, because literary theory’s debt to Derrida provides another explanation as to why Ricoeur’s hermeneutics met with such little enthusiasm during the age of theory. It is not quite that the wax-and-wane of theoretical prestige during that time can be reduced to Derrida versus Ricoeur, as if theory simply chose to put itself under the aegis of “Derrida,” and in so doing, Ricoeur was eclipsed. But their fortunes seem entwined, especially in the contexts of Anglo-American academia, where the importation of French theory, I think it is fair to say, did produce a certain “star-system.” But if, and reverting to Nussbaum’s criticism of theoretical anemia, the problem with theory was that it seemed oddly impersonal, and reduced literature to a similar impersonality, Vlacos evidently considers Ricoeur to be exempt from her charge. For he does speak about literature, [End Page 365] and does acknowledge that what matters is how...

Gothic revival in Mexico: French theory, English practices and the Stonemason’s craft

In recent years scholars have begun to recognize that the Neo-Gothic style enjoyed a much greater presence and acceptance in Mexico than the country’s architectural historians have cared to admit. From the late nineteenth century through most of the twentieth, the style was most often employed for ecclesiastical buildings, but it was also used for schools, residences and public buildings. In Mexico, the Gothic Revival style was practiced by three distinct groups of designers: trained architects working in a French or Italian mode, untrained master masons who imaginatively combined Gothic elements with classically inspired forms, and trained and mostly foreign architects practicing an English version of the Neo-Gothic style.

Gerard Genette and the Categorization of Textual Transcendence

A text relation with other texts has been a significant subject, which attracted the consideration of researchers, such as Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes and etc. within Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Gerard Genette, a French literary theorist, is one of the researchers who define “transtextuality” as a theory which is used when we are not sure about the interpretation of one text that we are reading. His theory describes the different methods in later text which motivates us to read an earlier one. This is the important reason that I have decided to look at his different methods. Genette broadens the study area of Julia Kristeva about “intertextuality” as a theory pointing to relation between various texts. He defines five categories of transtextuality, including intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, architextuality, and hypertextuality, which this paper will explore them as Genette’s textual transcendence. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5p533

Gegen, or Translating the (En)counter

The article discusses the notion of the ‘post-literary’ and ‘countertextuality’ by reconnecting them to previous theoretical contexts that have dealt with the question of ‘text’ and ‘textuality’. The word ‘countertextuality’ evokes the rise and fall of poststructuralism and deconstruction within the globalised, Anglo-American-dominated humanities. In order to see what countertextuality might mean or do for the current context the article briefly returns to the beginnings of French theory in the humanities from the 1970s onwards and critically evaluates the challenges these are facing today. It asks what kind of ‘object’ [Gegenstand] a (counter)text might be, under the current conditions of digitalisation. Against the focus on the countertextual as the result of a technology-driven transformation of text into code the article concludes by foregrounding the gesture and dynamics of ‘countering’ as a process of translation and its intrinsic issues of untranslatability.

Guattari, ideology and the ironies of theoretical (im)practice

At a time of general crisis and continuing Anglophone depoliticization of ‘French Theory’, it is crucial to affirm the affinities of Guattari with Marxism, including with Althusser. The particular uptake of Guattari in geography is submitted here to a critique by focusing on a series of ironies, which index the deliberately anti-Marxist habits of certain corners of our discipline.

Applied Guattari

The commentary unpacks the claim that human geographers have been zealous consumers of an ever-expanding array of French thinkers (Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan & Co.), and that they have been far too hasty in seeking to apply the resulting morass of ‘French Theory’ to the pressing concerns of human geography. It also considers the claim that the work of one notable French post-structuralist thinker – Félix Guattari – is unamenable to such immoderate consumption, hurried digestion and swift application: not only because the delirious Guattarian ‘jargon machine’ spews up a vast amount of always already obsolescent nonsense in the very place that is ordinarily reserved for an accumulation of sense (good, bad and obviously all too common) but also because this jargon machine is basically inexplicable and essentially inapplicable. Having grasped the virtue of theoretical indigestion, thoughtful impracticality and resolute inapplicability, the commentary makes a final splurge of ‘Applied Guattari’ by way of ‘Applied Derrida’.

Guattari

In the midst of a certain zeal for ‘French Theory’ in human geography and the social sciences of late, there has been something of a rush to operationalize Guattari (among others) in a pseudo-methodological manner; something we’re unashamedly guilty of ourselves. It’s easy to see why: journeying between cartography, metamodelisation, tracing, transversality, enunciation and diagramming, Guattari offers a seductive array of concepts and philosophical tools for human geographers. There seems, however, to be a disjuncture between the conceptual import of such terms and their empirical rendering. In this explicitly experimental article, we want to open up a series of lines of flight as to how Guattari can inform empiricism without reversion to straightforward application or metaphorical appropriation. In doing so, we offer a number of speculations on how Guattari’s work can be evoked in the crafting of a different tenor of well-established geographical methods. Put differently, we want to accentuate the impracticality of Guattari’s philosophy as its most generative vector for human geographic thought and technique.

Историко-герменевтический очерк философии Фальстафа на примере «княжьих зерцал» (наставления правителям) Абу-Хамида Мухаммеда Аль-Газали Ал-Туси: проайретический код

A hermeneutic analysis of the Oriental Philosophers´ writings is invariably a matter of great challenge and difficulty. It is always full of allegory and literary divagations which intersperse a smooth flow of argumentation. This paper is written by Marklen Konurbaev, Professor of Literature at Moscow State University and his son Salavat, a student of Arabic Philosophy. The paper consists of four parts and attempts to reveal the hidden message of a famous extract from the renowned book Ihya Ulum Al Din by a Persian philosopher Ghazall, Abu Hamid Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Al-TusI, devoted to the analysis of the notion of "fairness" in the doings of a ruler. The hermeneutic analysis was performed based on the methodology propounded by Roland Gerard Barthes — a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist and critic. This is the first ever attempt to put together the methodological efforts of a Western scholar and profoundly oriental piece of philosophy. Results of the hermeneutic study are stunning and elucidating. The paper could be recommended to the students of literature and philosophy at universities and colleges.

Mobilização social e mudanças políticas: revisitando o conceito de gramáticas de ação política

<p>A partir de 2003, com a posse de Néstor Kirchner na Presidência da República Argentina, ocorreram mudanças na dinâmica da mobilização social. Que forma assumiram os efeitos da mobilização social: foram assimilados, integraram-se ou criaram novas pautas de ação? Produziu-se uma reedição do populismo de meados do século XX? Os primeiros estudos nesse sentido utilizavam uma perspectiva pós-estruturalista, sobretudo a partir da obra de Ernesto Laclau. Esses, apesar das contribuições, apoiavam-se na oposição entre momentos de mobilização e de institucionalização. Ao contrário, o objetivo deste artigo é analisar esses processos em uma perspectiva sociopolítica, em especial a partir da noção de “gramáticas de ação política”, considerando as características que assumiram e os modos como se institucionalizaram os efeitos da mobilização. Sem pretender ser exaustivo, o texto analisará o caso argentino durante o Kirchnerismo, como base para um exercício de Sociologia Política.</p>

Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France

Joseph Harris. Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France. Oxford University Press, 2014. 304 pp. $85.00 USD, £55 (hardback). ISBN 9780198701613.Inventing the Spectator by Joseph Harris a lucid study of how early modern theorists conceptualized the spectator's experience with performances and literature. The author covers a wide range of drama theory in France from the first decades of the 1600s to the pre-Revolutionary period. By focusing on the relationships between subjectivity and theatre, Harris demonstrates that dramatic theory can offer privileged insight into the supposedly universal nature of human psychology (7). The author provides new insights into famous French theorists and dramatists (D'Aubignac, Corneille, Diderot, and Rousseau, for example) and brings to light the innovations of overlooked writers, such as Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Jean Chapelain, and Rene Rapin. Harris' writing clear and refreshing; he helpfully guides the reader through complex arguments without jargon or repetition.Harris' book perhaps the past decade's most exhaustive study of French theory for two reasons: first, he investigates theories from both classical and Enlightenment traditions, whereas most scholars separate the two (e.g., Georges Forestiers and John Lyons' recent work on the seventeenth century, or Pierre Frantz' and Scott Bryson's work on the eighteenth century); second, Harris examines both pro-theatrical (Corneille, Dubos, Diderot) and anti-theatrical (Pierre Nicole, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Bernard Lamy) conceptions of the spectating experience; most accounts of drama focus only on the former.Inventing the Spectator unfolds in eight chapters, several of which investigate the theories of specific writers, like D'Aubignac, Corneille, Dubos, Rousseau, and Diderot; other chapters discuss key emotional states of spectating, such as enthrallment, intellect, and identification. Despite the neat separation of ideas and authors in the table of contents, a few theoretical currents cut across most chapters. For example, Harris provides a particularly strong analysis of identification-a psycho-dramaturgical concept about which he has already published several articles. The author proves that identification far more complex than mere shared feelings between the members of the audience and the characters on stage. Several authors indeed present identification in this basic schema (D'Aubignac, for example), however, as Harris proves, identification far more variegated and complex in most theories at the time. Corneille, for example, undergirds his theory of identification in a set of a priori expectations by the spectator that are then met (or not) by the dramatist (96); while for Rousseau, identification less a function of illusion on stage than of an ideology inherent to theatre and theatrical life (207).In his chapter on Diderot, Harris proves that the model of identification proposed by the philosophe not in fact like the individualized, psychological connection between character and spectator that critics, both past and present, commonly associate with the drame. Instead, Diderot's identificatory scheme is metonymic rather than metaphorical; the spectator recognizes a broadly cognate self or neighbour in the character rather than wholly replacing one identity with another; and this operation succeeds, according to Harris, owing to the drame 's projection of a shared social context (243). …

Suicide as Protest in the French Workplace

France has experienced a sharp rise in work-related suicides in the 2000s with unprecedented numbers of workers choosing to kill themselves in the face of severe pressures at work. Drawing on testimonial material linked to recent suicide cases, this article examines the ‘social meanings’ of these suicides as defined by suicidal individuals themselves. Suicide and its causes have long been a central preoccupation of French theorists since Emile Durkheim's Le Suicide (1897). Recent suicides share a communicative, expressive and vindictive purpose and seem to contradict Durkheim's classic sociological definition of suicide. In a context of deteriorating working conditions and a collapse of collective forms of mobilisation, recent suicides may represent a new and extreme form of protest.

What Social Theory Can Learn from Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills’s Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions

I emphasize the usefulness of American sociology that follows the pragmatic structural-functionalism of the 1930’s, heavily influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology, by doing a major critique of Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions, emphasizing its holistic and pragmatic qualities, as well as its relation to the work of Max Weber. I then follow up with a critique of French and German social theory, based to a large extent on Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. I suggest the usefulness of supplementing what I consider to be their unpragmatic tendencies, particularly with their approaches to the relation between social structure and self-fulfillment, and here I consider the work of Jűrgen Habermas to be only a partial corrective.

'Introducing Michael Gove to Loïc Wacquant': Why Social Work Needs Critical Sociology.

In 2013, Michael Gove, then Secretary of State for Education and Health in the UK coalition government, criticised social workers for laying insufficient emphasis on the ‘agency’ of individuals and for being too preoccupied with social and economic inequalities. Such a perspective, which is not unique to Gove, needs to be countered by reaffirming the significance of an expansively critical sociology for social work. In this context, the thematic concerns of the French theorist, Loïc Wacquant, illuminates key aspects of social work engagement with clients which Gove and his ideological associates appear intent on ignoring. The issues raised have significant political resonances given the pending UK General Election taking place in May 2015.

Ismes: du realisme au postmodernisme

In addition to its advertised starting and finishing points, this lucid and amply documented volume incorporates three further case studies, devoted to futurism, existentialism, and structuralism. Drawing on her previous work on Apollinaire and Sartre, Anna Boschetti challenges the positivist model of successive ‘movements’, eschewing the false analytical categories implied by their labels and dismissing recourse to an ill-defined zeitgeist. With due reference to Bourdieu's ‘field of cultural production’, she demonstrates that -isms ignore the complex interplay of sociopolitical factors that constitutes the context in which writers respond to the need to redefine their relationship with an intrinsically unstable society. Literary specialists of certain persuasions will need to be tolerant of an enquiry that is focused more on authors than on texts and that recycles basic biographical and literary-historical facts and anecdotes in the service of a ‘field’ that only when viewed in its totality fractures received perspectives. The reader's patience is duly rewarded with an enhanced understanding of the controversial status of realism in post-1848 France (owing to an account that invites the attention of Courbet scholars in particular) and with a convincing interpretation of futurism as ‘la première véritable “avant-garde historique”’ (p. 112), one that, variously, focuses on the reaction of Apollinaire (the ‘homme-époque’ of Boschetti's previous book, La Poésie partout: Apollinaire, homme-époque (1898–1918) (Paris: Seuil, 2001)), emphasizes Marinetti's Franco-Italian identity, sees Dada and surrealism as reruns of futurism as far as the field of cultural production is concerned, and, in conclusion, engages with the aporetic nature of the very concept of the avant-garde. The authoritative deconstruction of existentialism (‘mot […] idiot’, according to Sartre himself in his ‘Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans’ in Situations X) goes beyond seeing it (and later structuralism) as a creation of the media to reveal a champ du pouvoir that explains its conception, evolution, and authority. A revisiting of the tensions between Sartre and Camus would nonetheless have been germane. It is also difficult not to conclude that Sartre's stature as a thinker is ultimately belittled by the nature of Boschetti's enterprise, which does not require philosophical exegesis as such. The studies of structuralism and postmodernism (especially, as far as the latter is concerned, in the form of ‘French theory’ in the United States) exert an unfamiliar appeal through their subordination to the author's overall strategy; but even with, for example, the aid of the unifying focus on structuralism as a set of practices within the social sciences, they fail always to resolve the competing demands of breadth and depth. Simple acceptance of the claims made by Foucault and Derrida to be writing against Sartre begs the question of their fundamental debt to this most influential of precursors. At times, the biographical information comes close to constituting a potted CV, while the claim that the example of Barthes, Greimas, and Todorov provided Stanley Fish with a model for the transformation of literature teachers into ‘des stars médiatiques’ (p. 295; no authority cited) is regrettable. The lack of an index may be explained by the multiple instances of name-dropping. Yet, overall, Boschetti's various accounts have the undoubted potential to stimulate similarly vigorous and thoughtful responses.

Rewriting the Death of the Author: Rancièrian Reflections

For decades now, critics of the “death of the author” thesis have worked themselves up about a paradox that supposedly undermines Barthes’s and Foucault’s treatment of the theme: these French theorists cannot banish the authorial voice from their own writing. Taking a lead from Jacques Rancière, this article tells a different story of the death of the author, one that makes better sense of this supposed case of double standards and that uses Nietzsche’s ideas on authorship to show that Barthes and Foucault are doing something much more powerful and interesting than simply contradicting themselves.

Rhythmic paradigms in the Cantigas de Santa Maria: French versus Arabic precedent

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the rhythmic meaning of the notation in the Cantigas de Santa Maria can be only understood by confronting it with different theoretical paradigms. Julián Ribera in 1922 defended an Arabic paradigm, to the exclusion of any other, but his access to Arabic historical writings was severely limited. Higinio Anglés in 1943 and most modern musicologists have since adopted French mensural theory, but recognised that it does not fit many songs. The author has demonstrated elsewhere that songs that do not fit the French paradigm often fit the Arabic one. The applicability of both paradigms, including their superimposition, is systematically compared here. After comparison of general concepts (ordo and period), of even-time composition (modes V–VI or conjunctive rhythm), of long–short opposition in ternary time (modes I–II or Ramal) and more complex patterns, the author provisionally concludes that very few patterns point unequivocally to French models, while in most cases (first and second mode and potential forms of the third mode) both French and Arabic paradigms could apply. In many other cases, encompassing both binary and ternary metre, the Arabic rhythmic paradigm is clearly either more fitting than the Parisian one, or the only one to apply.

Limitation of Liability in Adhesion Contract: A Comparative Analysis between the French Theory of 'Failure of Essential Obligation' and the U.S. Theory of 'Failure of the Essential Purpose'

This paper aims to shed light on the French and U.S. doctrines of “failure of essential obligation” and “failure of essential purpose”, and discuss how Courts use them to resolve issues arising from limitation of remedies clauses. The research will compare scholars and courts positions in the United States to the standards adopted in France, where courts instead of referring to the failure of essential purpose and unconscionability doctrines, prefer to rely on the “failure of the essential obligation” in the contract. While in France consideration is only given to the “failure essential obligation” to determine whether the clause is derisory or inapplicable to the circumstance purposed to, the legislator in the United States has developed two ways to resolve these issues: “the failure of the essential purpose” and the “unconscionability”. This paper analyzes the economy of the doctrines retained respectively in France (II) and in the United States (III), by exploring their similarities and potential gaps, and providing for recommendation as to which of the doctrines is better suitable in resolving issues inherent to disclaimer and limitation of liability clauses.

I Problems; Blindness and Autobiography

The literary genre of autobiography dates back to the 18th century, when philosophy became a type of anthropology, archives and case histories strengthened the grasp of discourse over life, and modern authorship and hermeneutics led to new modes of reading and writing. Nietzsche and so-called French theory have put significant strain on this constellation in their shared critique of language, subjectivity and authorship – a critique that makes traditional autobiography all but impossible. Needless to say, this has stopped neither Nietzsche nor a number of postmodern theorists from writing their own autobiographical texts. Interestingly, blindness is a recurring figure in many of these texts; and in this article, I argue that this figure allows us to trace the generic upheaval generated by the problematization of the discursive constellation that fostered modern autobiographical writing. By means of a brief introduction into the history of optics and a close reading of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and Cixous' 'Savoir,' I show that the malfunctioning eye is one of the figures employed to deinstitutionalize both the philosophical and the autobiographical tradition, allowing us to grasp what became of autobiography after philosophy pronounced the death of man, the subject, and the author.This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing in May 2014 and published on 16 March 2015.

Montager svøbt i matricepap. En materialearkæologisk undersøgelse af Asger Jorn og Guy Debords Fin de Copenhague

Thomas Hvid Kromann: Montages wrapped in flong. A material-archeological examination of Asger Jorn and Guy Debord’s Fin de Copenhague
 The article presents and analyses Fin de Copenhague, which was published in 1957 by the Danish painter Asger Jorn and the French theorist and activist Guy Debord. According to legend, this famous avant-garde masterpiece was created in a 24-hour fit of vandalistic creativity and bound in a waste product from the production of newspapers, “flong,” making every copy in this edition of 200 unique. Until recently, Fin de Copenhague has been analyzed within the theoretical framework of the Situationist International (1957–1972), focusing rather on the concept than the materiality of the book. In alignment with a heightened theoretical awareness of the importance of Jorn’s printed matter, the article closely examines Fin de Copenhague, drawing on a combination of art historical and book historical disciplines.The first part of the article is focused on the production, the distribution and the reception of the work. Hereby, the article presents the first thorough analysis of the intertextuality of the work as well as the international network the book circulated within. In the second part of the article, one finds an in-depth analysis of the flong. Until now, no research has focused on the variations of Fin de Copenhague. The author has collected photographic documentation of numerous covers from European and American libraries, copies owned by collectors, and copies sold at auction. In this way, the multiple covers can be studied, including the various aesthetic effects of each individual book cover. Furthermore, a material-archeology of the flong makes it possible to date the single pieces of flong, proving that Fin de Copenhague couldn’t possibly be created within these 24-hours. It is necessary to differentiate between finalizing the idea for the book, the printed work and the published work. In addition to this, the notion of the “social authorship” is underlined, stressing the importance of the printers Verner Permild and Bjørn Rosengreen.

70 Years' Planning Theory: A Post-postmodernist Perspective

This survey, a subjective critical review of ‘planning theory’ as it evolved since the mid- 20th century, has three parts. The first is a condensed account of the emergence of three distinct schools of thought: the radical-communicative, post-structuralist, and institutionalist streams. In the second part each stream is represented reviewing a typical book: Friedmann’s (2011) Insurgencies, Gunder and Hillier’s (2009) Planning in Ten Words or Less, and Webster and Lai’s (2003) Property Rights, Planning and Markets. The last part argues the author’s position - there is no ‘planning’, only diverse planning practices - and develops its implications for planning theory and practice. Questo articolo e una rassegna critica della ‘teoria della pianificazione’ cosi come si e evoluta dalla meta del ventesimo secolo. E diviso in tre parti. La prima parte e un resoconto condensato dell’emergenza di tre diverse scuole di pensiero: la prospettiva comunicativa, quella post-strutturalista e quella istituzionalista. Nella seconda parte, per ognuna delle precedenti prospettive, viene preso in considerazione un testo tipico, rispettivamente: «Insurgencies» di J. Friedmann, «Planning in Ten Word or Less» di M. Gunder e J. Hillier, «Property Rights, Planning and Markets» di C. Webster e L.W.C. Lai. Nella terza e ultima parte viene presentata la posizione di chi scrive - non esiste ‘la pianificazione’, ma solo diverse pratiche di pianificazione - e ne vengono sviluppate le implicazioni teoriche e pratiche.