Poststructuralist Critique Research Articles

Rethinking Identity and Coalitional Politics, Insights from Simone de Beauvoir

Abstract.Identity politics have been much maligned by the Left as politically divisive and philosophically untenable. But the need for identification in the process of countering demeaned identities and fostering counter-hegemonic projects has been underestimated by poststructuralist critics. Good at dismantling identities and deconstructing existing strategies of inclusion, the poststructuralists are not particularly helpful in thinking through forms of subjectivity and/or collective action that would contribute to coalition building. Beauvoir provides a worthy model for coalitional politics. Her theory of relational subjectivity avoids essentialism and fosters collaboration, if that work is premised upon connected existences, rather than identity. Her theory of alterity, or Othering, acknowledges power differentials and accommodates both cultural and economic forces of oppression, moving away from static, centralized and binary relations of power that have become associated with second-wave feminism and conventional Marxism.Résumé. La politique identitaire a été largement décriée par la gauche qui l'accuse de créer des dissensions et d'être philosophiquement insoutenable. Pourtant, le besoin d'identification dans le processus de soutien des identités dévaluées et de promotion de projets anti-hégémoniques a été sous-estimé par la critique post-structuraliste. Doués pour la déconstruction des identités et le démantèlement des stratégies d'inclusion, les post-structuralistes ont moins de talent pour concevoir des formes de subjectivité ou d'action collective qui contribueraient à la construction de coalitions. Simone de Beauvoir fournit un modèle précieux de politique de coalition. Sa théorie de la subjectivité relationnelle évite l'essentialisme et encourage la collaboration, si cet effort est basé sur des existences liées les unes aux autres plutôt que sur l'identité. Sa théorie de l'altérité reconnaît les différentiels de pouvoir et tient compte des forces oppressives, à la fois culturelles et économiques, abandonnant ainsi les rapports de pouvoir statiques, centralisés et binaires qui ont été associés avec le féminisme “ deuxième vague ” et le marxisme conventionnel.

Political ecology in the key of policy: From chains of explanation to webs of relation

Political ecology (PE) is rooted in a combination of critical perspectives and the hard won insights distilled from field work. The theoretical base of political ecology was joined, by Piers Blaikie and others, to an unflinching commitment to empirical observation of biophysical and socio-economic phenomena in place. To this already ambitious mix was added a practical intent to contribute to material as well as social change: a practical political ecology of alternative development ran beneath the surface of much of this work. For many this led to serious encounters with policy and the machinery of policy research institutions. While seemingly contradictory with the critical tenets of political ecology, Blaikie’s pursuit of this pathway led beyond the ivory tower to Political Ecology in the Key of Policy, initially to inform national and international policy and eventually expanding – through the work of second-generation PE – to address internal policy in social movements and alternative development networks. Among recent variations on political ecology that have built partly on the work of Blaikie, Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) expands PE to address women as a group, and gender as a category. FPE and post-structural PE are based on multiple actors with complex and overlapping identities, affinities and interests. An emergent wave of political ecology joins FPE, post-structural theory, and complexity science, to address theory, policy and practice in alternatives to sustainable development. It combines a radical empiricism and situated science, with feminist post-structural theories of multiple identity and “location”, and alternative development paradigms. This approach honors the legacy of Piers Blaikie and other PE founders yet incorporates the insights and political projects of feminism, post-structural critique and autonomous or alternative development movements.

Beyond the Post-Structural Impasse in the Anthropology of Development

In recent years anthropologists have produced innovative and critical scholarship that refuses to simplify or essentialise the development process. However, for the most part the anthropology of development remains closely tied to the post-structuralist paradigm. Why, after more than two decades, does the post-structuralist critique continue to hold its dominant grip on the anthropology of development? Why haven’t anthropologists been able to move the anthropology of development, or development itself, further ahead? These are the main questions addressed in this article. More specifically, it is argued that the anthropology of development has reached an impasse; it remains bound to an overly structural interpretation of the development process, a construction that privileges not only structure over agency, but also hegemony over dialectics. Using the ethnography of a high-profile case of development in northwest Namibia, the article suggests a possible path forward by outlining a proposal for a simultaneous theoretical re-orientation and methodological reclamation in the anthropology of development.

A pioneering reputation: Assessing Piers Blaikie’s contributions to political ecology

This paper assesses the key contributions made by Piers Blaikie to the field of political ecology. Those contributions relate to the way in which this scholar has sought to dismantle barriers to thought by: (1) integrating the insights of political economy with those from environmental science, (2) opening up theoretical space in political ecology by engaging fruitfully with post-structural critiques, (3) moving beyond a narrow area-studies and development studies focus, and (4) helping to internationalise the research field beyond its core American base. The paper also highlights ambiguity in the role played by Blaikie in political ecology, as stances that he has taken in his work have provoked wider debate over the field’s purpose and coherence. Ensuing tensions over theory and practice as well as single versus multiple truths persist yet, pace Blaikie and others (e.g. Robbins), a robust political ecology is nonetheless able to consider what people ‘do’ from a healthy diversity of theoretical positions. The multiple contributions of Piers Blaikie underpin a reputation for having produced a pioneering body of work that has inspired scholars across theoretical, empirical and disciplinary boundaries, thereby ensuring that his will be a reputation that is interpreted and re-interpreted for many years to come.

Care and the self: biotechnology, reproduction, and the good life

This paper explores a novel philosophy of ethical care in the face of burgeoning biomedical technologies. I respond to a serious challenge facing traditional bioethics with its roots in analytic philosophy. The hallmarks of these traditional approaches are reason and autonomy, founded on a belief in the liberal humanist subject. In recent years, however, there have been mounting challenges to this view of human subjectivity, emerging from poststructuralist critiques, such as Michel Foucault's, but increasingly also as a result of advances in biotechnology itself. In the face of these developments, I argue that the theoretical relevance and practical application of mainstream bioethics is increasingly under strain. Traditionalists will undoubtedly resist. Together, professional philosopher-bioethicists, public health policymakers, and the global commercial healthcare industry tend to respond conservatively by shoring up the liberal humanist subject as the foundation for medical ethics and consumer decision-making, appealing to the familiar tropes of reason, autonomy, and freedom.I argue for a different approach to bioethics, and work towards a new way to conceive of ethical relations in healthcare – one that does not presume a sovereign subject as the basis of dignity, personhood or democracy. Instead, I am critical of the narrow instantiations of reason, autonomy, and freedom, which, more recently, have been co-opted by a troubling neo-liberal politics of the self. Thus, I am critical of current trends in medical ethics, often running in tandem with corporate-governmental models of efficiency, accountability, and so-called evidence-based best practices. As an example of such market-driven conceptions of subjectivity, I discuss the paradigm of "self-care." Self-care shores up the traditional view of the self as a free agent. In this sense, self-care is looked upon favourably by mainstream bioethics in its focus on autonomy, while healthcare policy endorses this model for ideological and economic reasons. To contrast this, I propose a different model of care together with a different model of selfhood. Here I develop and apply Foucault's late work on the "care of the self." In this understanding of "care," I suggest that we might work towards an ethical self that is more commensurable both with recent theoretical views on subjectivity and – more pressingly – with the challenges of emergent biotechnologies. I end this paper with a discussion on ethical parenthood, which offers a practical reading of the "care of the self" in relation to new reproductive technologies (NRTs).

Transition, Telos, and Taxonomy

Anjan Chakrabarti and Stephen Cullenberg's Transition and Development in India provides a thorough critical discussion of Marxist debates about transition and development. Taking on board recent poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques, it builds an innovative alternative, using the concept of class sets, which avoids assuming that a society is dominated by a single mode of production. But while their approach successfully meets critiques about totalization and telos raised by metropolitan poststructuralist and postmodern scholars, its engagement with the subaltern studies school and postcolonial thought is less conclusive. The authors offer acute critical discussion of the postcolonial literature on subaltern subjectivity. But their class sets approach, by its nature, ultimately avoids the question of subjectivity altogether. This essay suggests that on-going difficulties in our approaches to subaltern subjectivity may be rooted in long-standing definitional problems with the detritus category “feudal” itself.

"I Can't Get Sexual Genders Straight": Kathy Acker's Writing of Bodies and Pleasures

“I Can’t Get Sexual Genders Straight”: Kathy Acker’s Writing of Bodies and Pleasures Annette Schlichter (bio) Abstract The essay explores Kathy Acker’s reconfiguration of heterosexual practice and identity in her “novel” Don Quixote. The essay shows how the production of dissident heterosexualities forms a radical critique of sexuality by situating Don Quixote in the controversy over what Michel Foucault has called “bodies and pleasures,” the counterdiscursive concept he distinguishes from the reigning system of sex-desire. Through its claim to represent and legitimize excessive, perverse female heterosexual desires, Don Quixote reimagines socio-sexual relations through “bodies and pleasures” without giving up the critical force that the notion of sex-desire has offered feminist critics of the construction of the subject. Acker queers the conditions of representation by deploying the oppositional potential of “bodies and pleasures.” Kathy Acker entered the public stage in the 1980s as a countercultural author to emerge in the 1990s as an icon of dissident postmodern literature.1 Much of the critical literature on her complex works engages Acker’s deconstructions and re-representations of gender, the body, and female sexuality, but her critique of heteronormativity and her rethinking of heterosexuality have been addressed only rarely.2 This is surprising insofar as Acker’s public performances and her writings are so keenly interested in the specific queer fusion of poststructuralist critiques of identity with attacks on the social regulation of sexualities. Yet the artist seems at odds with the contemporaneous discourses that lay claims to a critique of sexuality. To begin with, her critique of normativity does not emerge from a history of gay and lesbian struggles; while Acker expresses her queer identification as a perverse straight woman, she also proactively states her difference from lesbians and gays: A gay friend said something interesting to me. I asked her if she differentiated between gay and straight women, and she said, “Yes, women who are gay are really outlaws, because we’re totally outside the society—always. And I said, “What about people like me?” and she said, “Oh, you’re just queer.” Like—we didn’t exist?! [laughs] It’s as if the gay women position themselves as outside society, but meanwhile they’re looking down on everybody who’s perverse. Which is very peculiar.” (“Interview Juno” 182) By mobilizing perverse identifications, Acker’s work demonstrates the possibility of a queer critique through the representation of dissident heterosexuality. While staking not only a queer but also a feminist critical position, Acker rejects radical feminist readings that interpret heterosexuality as a form of sexual alliance with the patriarchal enemy: “heterosexual women find themselves in a double-bind: If they want to fight sexism, they must deny their own sexualities. At the same time, feminism cannot be about the denial of any female sexuality” (“Introduction” 130).3 Acker explores, as Catrin Gersdorf explains insightfully, practices of resistance outside “the non-heterosexual paradigms of opposition against patriarchal structures.” This project considers “the literary expression of the will to resist traditional power structures while acknowledging the legitimacy of female heterosexual desires” (154, my translation). As I show in this essay, Acker articulates a resistance against heteronormativity through the reconfiguration of heterosexual practice and identity. Her re-thinking of heterosexuality de- and re-constructs discourses of sexuality and gender, thereby exposing and pushing the limits of queer and feminist critiques of normativity. In order to show how the textual production of dissident heterosexualities forms a radical critique of sexuality, I discuss Acker’s contribution as an intervention into the controversy over the meanings of what Michel Foucault has named “bodies and pleasures,” the counter-discursive concept he distinguishes from the reigning system of sex-desire. In that debate, scholars of sexuality tend to welcome Foucault’s claim for the counter-discursive function of “bodies and pleasures,” proposing that particular queer sexual acts should be read as oppositional practices. In contrast, gender theorists have been skeptical about the critical potential of Foucault’s suggestion, especially about his reliance on a supposedly “genderless” notion of “bodies and pleasures.” By situating Acker in this controversy about “bodies and pleasures,” I hope not only to illuminate the theoretical dimension of her fiction, but...

The Uniform Civil Code: The Politics of the Universal in Postcolonial India

This article speaks of a debate in contemporary India: that surrounding the validity of enacting a civil code that applies uniformly to all communities and religions in the state. In certain feminist arguments, such a code is seen as possibly providing a sphere of rights to Indian women that is alternative to the rights – or wrongs – given to them by the plural religious laws, which form the basis of the civil law in India. India, however, is a heterogeneous polity, encompassing a diversity of cultures and religions, some dominant and others forming minorities. Given these differences, some critics see the feminist call for a Uniform Civil Code as an essentialist move that prioritises gender over other agendas and politics. They argue that the site of the ‚universal’ in this feminist move is a liberal site that inherently excludes marginalised Others and benefits the dominant subjects in India. In my article, I contest this critique and question whether the site of the universal and its authorial subject in postcolonial India is, in fact, an exclusionary liberal ruse of power. I draw insights from the history of the formation of the postcolonial nation-state in India to posit an experience of the state and the universal within it, which is alternative to the Western liberal model. The aim of this article is, therefore, not so much to debate the in/validity of a Uniform Civil Code, as to address certain contemporary post-structuralist critiques of the site of the universal in postcolonial India and posit a departure from them, based on perspectives drawn from history.

Disenchanted Modernity in Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man: Eugenics, Contraception, and BioIntervention

Citing Max Weber, sociologist John MacInnes has described twentieth-century condition as of and the process whereby responsibility for fate of world is accepted as a human rather than divine endeavour and its order seen as a social rather than natural or supernatural one (MacInnes 3; Weber, Disenchantment). As a result, the means chosen to pursue given ends, and even choice of which ends to pursue, came to be determined by logical and rational calculation (MacInnes 3)--or, might add, calculations that were seen by their proponents, with varying degrees of earnestness and cynicism, as rational or logical, and indeed beneficial. In twentieth century, as many observers have noted (see McLaren, Trombley, Haller, and Fontana), both progressive left and right embraced rationalization that followed upon disenchantment with natural and divine order; both left and right were products as well as agents of modernity, and they adopted similar measures to achieve their goal of taking control of human, social order. Robert The Studhorse Man, a novel published in 1969 and set in Alberta in last days of World War II, is an exemplary case of novelist's sensitivity to full life of his time, which on reading of it is emphatically an era of disenchantment, rationalization, and social engineering of kind described by Weber and MacInnes. Although The Studhorse Man has, in nearly forty years since its first publication, been discussed mainly in light of postmodern and deconstructive literary theory, other voices have been heard which have questioned adequacy of that approach, and gone on to both describe and challenge engagement with historical, social, and scientific realities of twentieth-century life. Nearly twenty years ago, Peter Thomas suggested that postmodernist criticism had failed to draw out and address moral implications of fiction: wonder, still, if postmodernism is not much too soft on Narcissus (Robert Kroetsch and His Works 256). Echoing Thomas, Peter Cumming has recently taken issue with postmodernist and poststructuralist critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Susan Rudy Dorscht for celebrating what they see as Kroetsch's destabilization of sexual identity and identity itself (Cumming 118), and, taking their cues from own influential criticism, for tending more toward adulation than (116) of their novelist. Reading The Studhorse Man as a self-declared heterosexual, male, feminist reader (115) concerned with of gender (115), Cumming concludes that Kroetsch is patriarchy's man (115), and that his novel is politically reactionary (129) and subject to bankruptcy (124). I am in sympathy with Peter Cumming's not unprecedented challenge (1) to major trend in criticism of fiction, and with his willingness to grapple with its moral content, though I am less happy with his castigation of his author for bankruptcy (124) merely because he finds that The Studhorse Man does not conform to what he regards as proper positions on his of gender. Such issues have been defined by protagonists operating in a particular time and climate of opinion--the mid-1990s world of academic criticism--and they might not be so clear-cut or so apposite as Cumming assumes when he intrepidly labels not only his author, but also himself as critic, something better left to others. At best, such ideological interrogation is a heuristic tool, application of which needs to be guided by an awareness of historical and broadly cultural context of novel. In The Studhorse Man, as a number of early critics noticed, (2) facts of history are insistently referred to, even by novelist's self-consciously allusive literary method. …

Traveling Beyond Dangerous Private and Universal Discourses

In this article, the author explores several definitions of reading and evaluating educational research texts without finding deep private meanings or developing objective, scientific, and instrumental norms for evaluating quality of educational research studies. Among these descriptions, the author emphasizes Gadamer's weak poststructural model and Habermas's critique of and contribution to it, aiming to replace the neoconservative objectivist and neoliberal subjectivist traditions with something of greater social and intellectual utility: a “dialectical and critical” theory of reading and evaluation of educational research. This alternative approach, based on philosophical hermeneutics, critical theory, and practical philosophy, identifies understanding, interpreting, and evaluating a research text as a political, ideological, ethical, critical, gendered, sexual, racial, transformative, social, discursive, deliberative, and performed experience. The author argues that knowledge developed from this alternative approach represents a step toward the development of transformative political practices and progressive institutions to challenge the neoconservative status quo at intellectual, political, and practical levels.

On the post-structuralist critique of development: a view from north-west Namibia

The Namibian government's long-standing plan to dam the Kunene River has generated heated discussion on a number of development issues, both within and outside the country. This article examines the discourses of the various groupings in the so-called Epupa debate by paying special attention to the ways they represent ‘development’, the project and the affected community; and it explores aspects of agency by focusing on Himba people's attempts to assert opposition to the project. The Epupa case also affords us the opportunity to evaluate aspects of the post-structuralist critique of development. The article suggests that the currently fashionable critique offers a simplistic interpretation of the development process and reveals the need for a more thorough (and insightful) scholarly engagement with development. 1Assistant Professor of Socio-cultural Anthropology, Department of Social Science, Roosevelt Academy, Utrecht University. Based on research carried out in Windhoek, Namibia, in 1999, this paper is a revised version of a dissertation submitted to the University of Cambridge in partial fulfilment of the MPhil degree in Social Anthropology (Friedman, 1999). The author would like to thank Leo Howe, Keith Hart, Alan Macfarlane, Fatima Müller-Friedman and two anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and/or critical readings of earlier drafts; and the English Speaking Union of San Francisco, Darwin College, Sir Bartle Frere's Memorial Fund, and the Rivers Video Project for generous financial assistance that made the research possible.

On the prospect of writing cinema history from below

Beginning with a consideration of recent discussions on the state of film history this essay explores some aspects of the relationship between the historiography of cinema and broader currents of contemporary historiography including the poststructuralist critique of history as a realist fiction. It engages with what Colin MacCabe has recently called 'the weaknesses and insularity' of contemporary film studies by advocating the development of histories of cinema that place audiences rather than films at their centre and integrate the quantitative methods of social history with the concrete and particular conditions of experience that are the predominant concern of micro-history.

Deconstructing ‘gender and development’ for ‘identities of women’

In this article, the gender and development paradigm is critically reviewed and an alternative framework of research –identities of women– is proposed. This article contends that the gender and development paradigm is primarily guided by the tenets of Western feminisms and economic development. The article also highlights other limitations of the paradigm, including its preoccupation with male–female inequalities, macro generalisations and symbolic representation of women and a limited inclusion of local contexts. The identities of women framework proposes to address the limitations of the gender and development paradigm by studying women's conception of their environment and women's understanding of their relationship with these environments. The identities of women framework is informed by poststructuralist critique of feminism, cultural anthropology and a socio‐psychological approach to identity.

Postmodernism and Criticality in Information Systems Research

This article identifies a gap in the inclusion of the postmodern concept in critical information systems (IS) research. Starting from the three critical tasks, insight, critique, and transformative definition, we argue that the second task of critique has been less commonly addressed. Filling that gap can begin by exploring how critical management studies have used both critical theory and postmodernism. The authors draw on Alvesson and Deetz’s (1996) argumentation that these two bodies of literature can complement each other and cohabit. There is no need for a unitary critical position, but there is currently an imbalance in critical IS research, as Habermassian approaches have remained untouched by a poststructuralist critique. Postmodern approaches are more cautious on transformative definition, and they are well suited to the task of critique. They have also been applied to examine modernist themes such as performativity and managerialism, which relate to underresearched and undercritiqued modernist concepts in IS.

Paradox in the Pursuit of a Critical Theorization of the Development of Self in Family Relationships

This article starts with my dissatisfaction with the post-structuralist treatment of the production of subjectivity within regulatory discourses and practices due to its neglect of psychological processes. Taking starting points from within the history set out in the previous article, it highlights the paradox for critical psychologists like myself involved in both applying a post-structuralist critique to ‘psy’ discourses and trying to theorize subjectivity in a way that goes beyond the dualism of individual and society, of psychology and sociology. The relational, or intersubjective, approach to self that originates in object relations psychoanalysis as it emerged in the mid-20th-century UK is central to both of these activities; object of the former and resource for the latter. I explore the paradox that this creates for critical psychology, both epistemological and ontological. In aiming to provide a psycho-social account of self in family relationships, I deploy the radical conceptualization of intersubjectivity initiated in British object relations theory as a way of going beyond both the individualized self and the neglect of psychological processes in constructionist theorizing subjectivity.

IDENTITY POLITICS AND ITS DISCONTENTS

This essay examines an ironic situation in the use of postcolonial identity politics in contemporary Hong Kong cultural studies, in which the postcolonial cultural politics that criticizes the marginalization of Hong Kong people by Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism has also allowed newly empowered Hong Kong constituencies to use the same cultural politics as a strategy to assert dominance in ethnocentric and racist terms. Postcolonialism has so far focused on the poststructuralist critique of cultural misrepresentations while neglecting most of the structural inequalities beyond the cultural realm. What we need from postcolonialism is not just a differential identity politics useful in subverting cultural hegemonies ad infinitum. We also need an effective engagement with the quotidian effects of colonial legacies affecting people in and beyond the cultural realm. As one such attempt, this essay evaluates the critical potency of four prominent and contesting analytical frames in Hong Kong cultural studies by contextualizing their operations in a translocal context. I discuss Rey Chow's postulation of Hong Kong as the marginalized entity in between two colonizers, Britain and China. Posed against this discourse is what I call a petit-grandiose Hong Kongism, a kind of inferiority-superiority response to Hong Kong's multiple colonial experiences, both British and Chinese. The notion of Hong Kong's relation to China in terms of Hong Kong's ‘Northbound Cultural Imaginary’ is then examined. This refers to Hong Kong's mainstream cultural imaginary that posits its claim to cosmopolitanism as a justification for an implied economic and cultural expansion towards China. This cultural imaginary is justified by another Hong Kong mainstream cultural imaginary, one which sees China as a national, economic and cultural threat expanding towards Hong Kong to the south. I call this Hong Kong's imagined China ‘Southbound Cultural Imaginary’.

Flat ontology and the deconstruction of scale: a response to Marston, Jones and Woodward

To identify the subject matter of human geography it is generally necessary to draw spatial boundaries at some level of abstraction. Whether the focus is upon patriarchalism or the new imperialism, areal differentiation or economic integration, the determination of such boundaries will usually be required at some stage in the proceedings. Spaces do not however occur in the singular: each locality, for example, is defined not only by contrast with other localities, but also with non-local territories of different sizes (such as bodies or regions). Indeed, it is by codifying this system, projecting a world that is divided not only into a 'horizontal' structure (in which similar activities are organized at similar scales in different places) but also a 'vertical' structure (in which different activities are organized at different scales covering the same places), that scale analysis acquires its conceptual power. The framework of nested scales was introduced during the 1950s and 1960s as a categorical device for describing spatial patterns at different levels of aggregation. From the early 1980s it was however argued that scales reflect real differences in the territorial organization of society, and it is on this basis that scale analysis (including perhaps the body, home, locality, region, nation, supranational and global levels) has extended its influence: 'integral to the production of space, capital produces certain distinct spatial scales of social organisation' (Smith 1984, 87; see also Taylor 1982; Kurtz 2003; Gough 2004; Uitermark 2005; for a useful review see Sheppard and McMaster 2004). But whether it is composed of nominal categories or real territories, the scale analytic cannot be segregated from the rest of traditional human geography but is symptomatic of this, and of the spatial structuralism with which it is generally imbued. Over broadly the same period, however, the writings of Lacan and Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, Cixous and Irigaray have informed a post-structural critique of presence and identity that challenges the coherence of abstract structures. Feminists have argued, for example, that the spaces of structural geography, the spaces that can be exhaustively analysed scale by scale, express the territorial logic of patriarchy (Rose 1993, 149; 1996, 62). The masculine desire to stabilize meaning leads therefore to the drawing of boundaries around territories: 'envelopes are another solid then; they depend on a certain kind of space to constitute the masculine subject and his feminine (m)other' (Rose 1996, 71). Indeed, in her deconstruction of these boundaries Rose pursues the language of a 'paradoxical space', a space that lurks beneath the bounded space of geography, a space of flows and melding that (for example) undermines the distinction between the real and the metaphorical: 'It is to write as if the mirrors were not solid but permeable, as if the tain could move ...' (Rose 1996, 72; 1993, 140-1). But perhaps the first deconstruction of spatial structuralism after that of Derrida himself was provided by actor-network theory, which acknowledges the reality of macrostructures (such as nested scales)

The Translational Signified. Slips of the Tongues in Freud's Works

This article deals with the significance of translation in two selected texts by Sigmund Freud: Dream and Delusion in Wilhelm Jensen's 'Gradiva' (1907) and Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910). The discussion of the functional role which translations from one language into another play in Freud's case studies will lead to the working hypothesis of a “translational signified”. Derived from what deconstructive criticism calls the 'transcendental signified', this concept seems to be central for Freud's use of “foreign language” evidence. More specifically, and against the grain of the assumptions held by poststructuralist critics for whom Freud was an influential predecessor, it can be demonstrated how the argumentation of Freud's analyses crucially requires a warrant of significational equivalence between the Italian original and the German translation. The example of Freud's interpretive use of the Italian word sole (as 'Sonne', or 'sun') as well as the counter example of Freud's mistranslation of the word nibbio in the study on da Vinci will help to substantiate the argument.

Who speaks? Grammar, Memory, and Identity in Beckett's Company

Who speaks? Grammar, Memory, and Identity in Beckett's Company Justin Beplate (bio) In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche declares, with his characteristic blend of pithiness and hyperbole, that "we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar" (19). Long before the advent of post-structuralist critiques of "presence," Nietzsche's remark takes aim at the complicity of our language in accommodating a misplaced faith in metaphysical forms, a "crude fetishism" of Being as an originating presence rather than a derivative concept. "Being is thought in, foisted in everywhere as cause," he writes, when in truth "only following on from the conception 'I' is the concept 'Being' derived." And yet "nothing has had a more naïve power of persuasion so far than the error of Being [. . .] for it has on its side every word, every sentence we speak!" (18–19). Throughout his writings, Nietzsche pursues this idea that Being—an agency transcending the material conditions of our existence—is little more than a fantastic prejudice of reason perversely sustained by our habits of language. He is in fact preceded by David Hume in leveling this charge. In his inquiry concerning our supposed idea of self in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume asks: "from what impression could this idea be derived? This question is impossible to answer without a manifest contradiction and absurdity [. . .]" (251). The central difficulty for Hume concerns the conspicuous lack of any one impression that could possibly give rise to the concept of self: an entity characterized by continuity in time, perfect identity, and simplicity. "The mind," he declares, "is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different" (253). After demonstrating the incoherence of "self" as a possible object of philosophical inquiry, Hume is led to a conclusion of "great [End Page 153] importance": namely, "that all the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties" (262). Hume's remarks on language and identity raise a problem that has taxed modern European thinkers to a marked degree, posing in stark terms a notion that has become a commonplace of contemporary French theory: that the self is an effect of language and that the interrelated problems of self-identity and consciousness are inescapably tied to the problem of language. Foucault's analysis, in The Order of Things, of what he sees as a profound epistemological shift at the close of the eighteenth century locates a widespread rupture in the classical relations ordering language and knowledge. Language lost its status as transparent medium and began to acquire its own weight as a possible object of knowledge. Coalescing in the form of a dense historical objectivity, it was increasingly viewed as the reserve for all those unconscious deposits of tradition and memory that inform discursive practices over time. At the threshold of modernity, then, language was "demoted" to the status of an object: an "autonomous organic structure" (295). One of the compensations for this demotion of language, Foucault suggests, was a renewed concern with textual exegesis, as nineteenth-century philologists labored over the hidden deposits of language, discovering those buried histories that pattern our everyday discursive habits. Criticism, in other words, sought to counteract the trap laid by a profoundly amnesiac conception of language: Having become a dense and consistent historical reality, language forms the locus of a tradition, of the unspoken habits of thought, of what lies hidden in a people's mind; it accumulates an ineluctable memory which does not even know itself as memory. Expressing their thoughts in words of which they are not the masters, enclosing them in verbal forms whose historical dimension they are unaware of, men believe that their speech is their servant and do not realize that they are submitting themselves to its demands. The grammatical arrangements of a language are the a priori of what can be expressed in it. (297) If the question of epistemological limits turns on...

The Politics of Nonduality: Reassessing the Work of Transcendence in Modern Sikh Theology

This article interrogates the ideological foundations of modern Sikh theology as found in the exegetical commentaries on Sikh scripture written by scholars belonging to the neocolonial reformist movement, the Singh Sabha. Drawing on post-structuralist critiques of transcendence, I argue that attempts by the Singh Sabha’s leading ideologue, Bhai Vir Singh (BVS), to construct a hermeneutic faithful to scripture could not avoid transforming what can be termed as the “middle ground” of Sikhism, a ground that is broadly continuous with Indic patterns of time and ontology. Breaking with earlier traditions of exegesis, the form of BVS’s commentary on the nature of the nondual One begins to resemble an ontological proof for God’s existence. Deploying a strategy in which all links to time and sense are systematically erased allows BVS to disguise the work of theological transcendence as a process that’s entirely natural to the meaning of Sikh scripture and by implication continuous with a tradition which claims to reproduce the original teachings of the Sikh Gurus (gurmat). By eclipsing the paradoxical notion of the One common to premodern Indic traditions with a consistent and systematic concept of God, BVS not only lays the foundations for modern “Sikh theology,” he also helps to underwrite the future master narrative of Sikhism as a “world religion.”