Poststructuralist Research Articles

Living with Madness: Experimental Asylums in Poststructuralist France

Living with Madness: Experimental Asylums in Poststructuralist France

Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path ed. by David V. Fiordalis

Reviewed by: Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path ed. by David V. Fiordalis Leah Kalmanson BUDDHIST SPIRITUAL PRACTICES: THINKING WITH PIERRE HADOT ON BUDDHISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE PATH. Edited by David V. Fiordalis. Berkeley: Mangalam Press, 2018. xii+ 333 pp. One can rarely say of an edited volume that it is a "page-turner." Yet, that is indeed how I would describe the excellent new collection of essays Buddhist Spiritual Practices, compiled by David V. Fiordalis. Not only are the individual chapters each highly engaging, but the collection overall is well curated—the essays comprise a cohesive whole, following a path of thematic and philosophical development that encourages readers to make connections across chapters and draw more general conclusions. Each author is, in one way or another, responding Pierre Hadot's work on "spiritual exercises," or the contemplative practices of Greek and Roman thinkers that reflect, as Hadot asserts, an approach to philosophy as a comprehensive "way of life" distinct from the pedantry of the academic discipline today. As such, the authors in this collection see Hadot's ideas as starting points for reassessing our understanding of "Buddhist philosophy," its relation to Western philosophical theories and methods, and its status within academia. The collection opens with a cautionary essay by Steven Collins "Some Remarks on Hadot, Foucault, and Comparisons with Buddhism." Fearing that terms such as "spiritual exercises" or "philosophy as a way of life" too easily become slogans divorced from their original context, he provides critical commentary on the French-to-English translations of key works, as well as an overview of the disagreements between Hadot and Michel Foucault, whose later work on "technologies of self" was indebted to Hadot. This serves as a useful orientation for readers who might be, as Collins speculates, scholars of Buddhism not necessarily familiar with these particular French theorists (p. 69). Sara L. McClintock takes a similar cautionary approach in the next essay, "Schools, Schools, Schools—Or, Must a Philosopher Be Like a Fish?," where she questions whether so-called schools of philosophy in the Greek and Roman world map meaningfully onto any of the senses in which the English term "school" is used to describe Buddhist lineages. For Hadot, she notes, membership in a designated philosophical school (skholē) is central to his notion of philosophy as a specific "way of life" practiced by a community with a distinct identity and certain institutional infrastructures (p. 72). In contrast, she says, we use [End Page 331] "school" in the Buddhist context more loosely to refer to at least three different but overlapping possibilities: "institutions of teaching and learning" (p. 79) as found, for example, at monasteries; communities united by "discursive and nondiscursive forms of practice" (p. 79), in the sense of "schools of thought" or lineages, none of which seem neatly distinguished from each other when historical evidence is considered (p. 90); and "doxographical hypostatizations of discursive practices" (p. 79) through which various thinkers rhetorically assert their ideological allegiances regardless of their actual institutional affiliations or intellectual communities. To the extent that we can say that Buddhist philosophy is a "way of life" in Hadot's sense, we must contend with the ambiguous application of the term school to the study of Buddhism. McClintock concludes by reading her taxonomy of schools back onto the contemporary university, asking in what sense academic philosophers are members of schools promoting specific ways of life. Subsequent essays in the volume give readers much food for thought related to McClintock's questions about the relevance of the collection's major themes to academic philosophy today. In "The Spiritual Exercises of the Middle Way: Reading Atiśa's Madhyamakopadeśa with Hadot," James B. Apple provides a close reading of the contemplative practice outlined in the Special Instructions on the Middle Way, with an eye toward the role played by philosophical analysis in Atiśa's method. As he says, the practitioner begins by noting two main categories of existing things—material and nonmaterial. Through analysis, material things are dissolved into their constituent parts, until not even the smallest specks remain. Similarly, through analysis, the practitioner comes to see that a nonmaterial entity...

Today Roland Barthes is Dead: Killing the Body of Theory in The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet

On February 25th 1980, in front of the Coll ge de France, a traffic accident claimed a victim whose name was not unfamiliar: that of the famous semiotician and literary critic Roland Barthes. Was it merely an accident, or was it murder? In a bizarre police investigation, in which the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred, police commissioner Jacques Bayard and his assistant, the young semiotician Simon Herzog, will prove that Roland Barthes was indeed killed, because he was in possession of a mysterious manuscript on the seventh function of language.This article demonstrates the strategies that Laurent Binet adopts to problematize the myth that has been formed around the work and life of Roland Barthes. By staging Barthes's fictional murder, Binet liquidates the canonical monument of French Theory via the lowbrow intervention of the detective story. By killing off Roland Barthes, a tutelary figure of modern semiology, Binet questions the limits and potentialities of Barthes's legacy in today's post poststructuralist era when theorists are being increasingly assimilated into the popular culture, while also being fetishized within the closed academic eco-chambers. Binet adopts a popular genre to follow Barthes's steps in dismantling yet another one of the bourgeois myths - the Canon of High Theory. Finally, this article shows that Binet’s novel is an attempt to reanimate Barthes and French Theory by resituating their writings in the realm of the popular, material, and accessible.

French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically by Stephanie Posthumus

Reviewed by: French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically by Stephanie Posthumus Jonathan F. Krell Posthumus, Stephanie. French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2017. Pp. 249. $61.00 CDN. In articles such as "Vers une écocritique française: le contrat naturel de Michel Serres" or "Engaging with Cultural Difference: The Strange Case of French Écocritique," Stephanie Posthumus has long been calling for a distinctly French ecocriticism, which would recognize cultural differences between the French and Anglo-American world. For example, American environmentalists tend to value the preservation of wilderness, untouched-or barely touched-by humans, whereas the French have emphasized "landscape preservation" (17), where culture implies cultivation, and thus includes farmland and the architectural patrimoine of rural France (17-19). Another difference is that in North America, ecocriticism owes much to environmental studies, whereas in France it has been shaped by a spatial, geographical approach: géocritique and géopoétique (21-22). As a bilingual Canadian well-read in both North American and European ecocritical studies, Posthumus is particularly well suited to the delicate task of delineating a French écocritique without tearing it away from its North American counterpart. She insists on the importance of considering both theory and fiction; therefore, her study is not purely about ecological themes, but is also a literary study, "attentive […] to the formal and structural elements of the literary texts in question" (23). She forms her analysis around four ecological concepts: subjectivity, dwelling, politics, and ends, exploring each concept by studying a philosopher and a fiction writer whose works illustrate the concept in question. In order to elucidate ecological subjectivity, Posthumus chooses Félix Guattari and Marie Darrieussecq; for ecological dwelling, Michel Serres and Marie-Hélène Lafon; for ecological politics, Bruno Latour and Jean-Christophe Rufin; and for ecological ends, Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Michel Houellebecq. Chapter One explores how the idea of "subject" has evolved in ecocriticism, as the human has lost its exclusivity as subject. Guattari's The Three Ecologies (1989)1 opposes "capitalistic subjectivity" and "articulate[s] subjectivity within three overlapping domains-the mental, the social, the environmental" (32), the latter of which must include "machinic ecology" (36). Darrieussecq's Bref séjour chez les vivants (2001) can be analyzed in the light of Guattari's three ecologies. The novel recounts the lives of a woman and her three daughters: teenage Nore lives with her mother in the Basque Country, Jeanne is married and living in Buenos Aires, and Anne is single in Paris. Guattari's social ecology helps the reader interpret the complex relationships among these four women. For instance, Anne, who has difficulty relating to her body, but instead is more comfortable envisioning the noosphere, or world of ideas, illustrates mental ecology; she imagines herself connected to the "worldwide consciousness," a [End Page 523] node of the "world's encephalic field" (44). Finally, regarding environmental ecology, Posthumus stresses the role of "watery landscapes" (48) in Darrieussecq's fiction. The oldest sister Jeanne drowns at the end of the novel, trapped as her car descends into a river. Like her brother who drowned as a boy, Jeanne too will become a hybrid, a human transformed into a creature of the waters. Marie, the protagonist of the "autofictional" novel Le Pays (2005), represents ecological subjectivity as proposed by Guattari. Her body is "porous," united with the environment, as Posthumus demonstrates: "Vos molécules se mélangent au ciel et à l'eau, la solitude se diffuse. Les mots et les choses s'écartent, la pensée ne suit plus, les signes se désamarrent; et le moi devient une grande béance pleine d'éau salée" (54). Chapter Two studies the theme of "dwelling" in the light of l'exode rural that has changed the role of the French paysan. Along with the sailor, the farmer represents for Michel Serres the human being most apt to undertake a "natural contract" with the world, since he has been forced to adapt to "constantly changing local conditions" (70). In The Natural Contract (1990), Serres moves from the local to the global, forging "a new relationship between global earth...

The Pedagogy of the Aesthete: Oscar Wilde and Harold Bloom

The Pedagogy of the Aesthete:Oscar Wilde and Harold Bloom Daniel Rosenberg Nutters (bio) Cecily. I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should probably forget them all. Miss Prism. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry with us. —Oscar Wilde (1965, 57) In an interview given several months before his death, Edward Said comments, "any sign, in my opinion, of defeatism or dandyism or aestheticism à la Harold Bloom with his pathetic imitation of Oscar Wilde…is to be resisted" (Mallios 2005, 299). Such mockery is not an uncommon reaction to the invocation of Bloom's name in contemporary academic circles. I speak only of my own experience as one who proudly declares his Bloomian inheritance. In our time of political urgency, however, a moment of unending academic crises and the apparent actualization of doomsday prophesies from yesteryear, Bloom can be diminished to a caricature. To find it coming from Said is surprising given Bloom's importance for the worldly critic's thinking about beginnings and each critic's shared debt to Vico and agonistic vision of history. But when Bloom decries that he is tired of hearing about the political responsibilities of the literary critic and longs for a book on the literary responsibilities of the politician, the frustrated groans from recent generations of scholars might drown out the subtle continuity his "imitation of Oscar Wilde" has with Said's own understanding of criticism as performance. If we amended Bloom by substituting intellectual for politician, surely a reader would be liable to assume it is a quote from Said! Nevertheless, at least since the publication of The Western Canon and his full-scale attack on the school of resentment, Bloom is associated with the worst of aestheticism and it is easy to see him as a latter-day Saul Bellow searching for an African Tolstoy when he quips about literary studies denigration into lesbian Eskimo studies. How might we assess his legacy in this context? If Bloom thinks of himself as a comic critic fated to get all the serious reviews, how can those serious critics miss the element of (trivial) play within his prose? Like few others, Bloom's writing perfects the truth of masks and self-reinvention. Throughout [End Page 333] his career, he has been a Blakean rebel contesting the dominance of Eliotic New Criticism, a master-theoretician and systematizer in his tetralogy, a high priest of the Western canon, and, starting with the publication of The Anatomy of Influence, or maybe a bit further back with Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? or How to Read and Why, Bloom has transformed himself again. His late style is somber yet always humane and life-affirming, highly self-conscious, introspective, and wary of his previous guises. In The Anatomy of Influence, for example, Bloom opens with a section entitled "The Point of View for My Work as a Critic." The three chapters it contains offer a powerful defense of literature and criticism that reveals a pervasive continuity throughout his corpus. His focus on the sublime, otherness, and estrangement suggest that from the beginning of his career Boom's interest has simply been literature's ability to "transpor[t] us beyond ourselves, provoking uncanny recognition that one is never fully the author of one's work or one's self" (Bloom 2011, 20). This is a sentiment we find not only in the work of Bloom, but many of his peers in the so-called Yale School, not to mention others who write under the aura of French theory. I recall my M.A. advisor, a scholar of Derridean persuasion, reminding me to cultivate my "scene of writing." My dissertation advisor would confidently substitute "scene of instruction." Whatever the technical differences between Derrida's reading of Freud and Bloom's counter-reading, those critics we associate with theory demonstrate an unrelenting commitment to literature that enables transport. The devotion to the sublime as that which transcends the human is a deeply anti-humanistic sentiment. For Emily Dickinson, transport engenders pain and, for Bloom, it provokes the "uncanny recognition" that selfhood remains...

Toward Transcultural Theory

Toward Transcultural Theory

When I Met Kathy Acker

When I Met Kathy Acker

Catharsis : tentative de légitimer la fiction théâtrale au XVIIe siècle en France

The article deals with French views on tragic emotions and their involvement as a means of katharsis as described by Aristotle in the chapter 6 of his Poetics. Although the 17th-century French theorists and dramatists attempt to adopt Aristotle ’s principles, at the same time they progressively move aside from the fearful events which are essential in Aristotle ’s definition of tragic experience. Pierre Corneille openly admits that he finds it hard to acquiesce to the very speculative nature of Aristotle ’s reasoning and hence he pleads for the cathartic value of “admiration”. His arguments serve not only the defence of his personal conception of tragic art but, more importantly perhaps, they enable him to confound the rigorous detractors of theatrical fiction.

Социальные практики питания детей в эпоху проектного капитализма

The paper analyzes the relationship between the type of capitalism and social child feeding practices. The analysis methodology is based on the French Theory of Conventions Economics by L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello. It is argued that in the 20th – 21st centuries there has been a transition from the domestic type of capitalism characterized by the specific culture of homemade production and consumption to the industrial and then the project one that changes the social child nutrition practices. The current food-related health problems of children are the result of the industrial capitalist consumer culture that has been established. Within the project type of capitalism, there are differences in social child feeding practices in families of different social strata. Thus, the middle class tends to the industrial food culture; the upper middle and upper classes prefer mainly homemade food culture while the lower class demonstrates the features of these two cultures.

Cummings’ l(a Under the Perspective of Post-structuralism

Cummings’ l(a Under the Perspective of Post-structuralism

French Theories in China and the Chinese Theoretical (Re)construction

Abstract Of all the Western critical theories received in China, French theories have exerted the greatest influence on China’s literary theory and criticism. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy and literary theory have had tremendous influence not only on China’s contemporary literature but also on its literary theory and criticism; Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive critical theory has helped form a unique version of Chinese postmodernism; and Alain Badiou’s Maoist passion and his critical reception in China’s cultural and intellectual circles have spurred Chinese intellectuals to reflect on the legacy of Maoism. Inspired by these theorists, this article puts forward a theoretical construction of world poetics that is not founded merely on Western or Eastern literature, and is not simply Eastern and Western literary poetics put together, but offers a new theory, based on substantial studies of world literatures and theories, that can be used to interpret all literary phenomena, Eastern and Western alike.

With Chinese Characteristics

Abstract The articles at the center of this issue of MLQ, Wang Ning’s “French Theories in China and the Chinese Theoretical (Re)construction,” Zhang Jiang’s “On Imposed Interpretation and Chinese Construction of Literary Theory,” and Zhu Liyuan’s “Hillis Miller on the End of Literature,” address the interchange between Chinese and Western literary theories. What transpires from these essays is that all Western theories, when “traveling” to China, assume “Chinese characteristics,” reflecting changing historical and ideological conditions but also the vector of influence running predominantly from Western theories to Chinese practice. To different degrees, and with varying urgency, all three Chinese scholars lodge a plea for greater recognition of Chinese theories in the West and for Chinese scholarship to construct a theory of its own, rooted in the Chinese tradition. By way of a new translation, with commentary, by Zhang Longxi of a celebrated 1980s article by Qian Zhongshu, the present essay argues that examples of a fruitful use of both Western and Chinese theory and literature already exist and may further put into practice what Wang, Zhang, and Zhu so forcefully call for.

The Making of The Tourist1

The author reflects on the historical context and intellectual and institutional foundations for his (1976) study The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, especially its connections to classic social and critical theory, and its fit with post structuralism and deconstruction. The influence of Marx, Durkheim, C.S. Peirce, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Goffman and Derrida are discussed. The method of The Tourist is to follow tourists looking for clues about the shape and direction of human society today. Its approach is antithetical to the domain fragmentation occurring in the university whereby knowledge of society is broken up and distributed across disconnected fields such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, communication studies, et cetera. As tourists cross all these domains they open new pathways toward holistic understanding of emergent societal arrangements. The final section addresses misreadings of the author’s concepts of “alienated leisure” and “staged authenticity.”

A igualdade em paradoxo: uma abordagem enunciativa

Este estudo realiza uma análise semântica do termo igualdade. Utilizou-se como fundamento a teoria da enunciação de linha francesa, desenvolvida no Brasil por Guimarães (1995; 2002). A análise tomou como objeto textos jurídicos produzidos por ministros do Supremo Tribunal Federal, nos quais aparecem os usos da palavra igualdade. Os resultados da análise indicam que a significação dessa palavra não está fundamentada na relação “A igual a B”. Esse novo sentido está fundamentado na relação “A deve ser igual a B”. Assim, os ministros justificam a decisão de adotar cotas raciais nos processos de seleção para as universidades, no intuito de transformar em realidade esse novo conceito.

A Qualitative Exploration of the Adult Intercountry Adoptee Experience in Australia

Using a post-structuralist narrative approach, this article focuses on insights gained from a qualitative study with 11 Australian intercountry adult adoptees with particular reference to their adoption experiences and post-adoption support needs. From thematic analysis, six interrelated, overlapping themes are reported. These are as follows: connecting to the past, the ambiguous self, the experience of racism, being grateful, safe and unsafe zones, and post-adoption support needs. Key findings relate to the Australian experience of unmet need and support the importance of the adoptee voice in determining appropriate support.

“THE BRIDES OF DECONSTRUCTION AND CRITICISM” AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF FEMINISM IN THE NORTH AMERICAN ACADEMY

“The Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism,” an informal group of feminist literary critics active at Yale University during the 1970s, were inspired by second-wave feminist curriculum, activities, and thought, as well as by the politics of the women's and gay liberation movements, in their effort to intervene into patterns of female effacement and marginalization. By the early 1980s, while helping direct deconstructive reading away from the self-subversiveness of French and English prose and poetry, the Brides made groundbreaking contributions to—and in several cases founded—fields of scholarly inquiry. During the late 1980s, these feminist deconstructionists, having overcome resistance from within Yale's English Department and elsewhere, used their works as social and political acts to help pave the way for the successes of cultural studies in the North American academy. Far from a supplément to what Barbara Johnson boldly called the “Male School,” the Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism arguably were the Yale school. Examining the distinct but interrelated projects of Yale's feminist deconstructive moment and how local and contingent events as well as the national climate, rather than the importation of so-called French theory, informed this moment gives us a clearer rendering of the story of deconstruction.

A arquitetura interna do suspense: o ritmo enunciativo na graphic novel Cachalote

The recent graphic production has expanded the boundaries of comics by multiplying the means of placement and circulation, the market, and cultural attention to these artistic discourses. Looking at this cultural expansion, in this work, we examine the graphic novel Cachalote (2010), produced by Daniel Galera and Rafael Coutinho, having emerged in this scenario and presenting characteristics of experiments in language in transit with other artistic practices. With the purpose of having a reading of the practice of suspense as responsible for the thread of narrative, reader adherence and its influences and gains for a comic experimentation, we selected a French semiotic theory, in the proposal of Pietroforte (2009) and in the theory from McCloud’s comics (2008) to detail the narrative rhythm of suspense as regularities and inventions of comic book expression. In this way, an analysis of the graphic novel allows a look at the artistic result of the intense artistic practices of the recent comics and their aesthetic gains.Keywords: Cachalote, semiotics, suspense.

REPRESENTAÇÕES SOCIAIS E SOCIEDADES

Resumo: Designadas “saber de senso comum”, diferente do saber científico, mas de grande importância para a vida social e, por essa razão, dignas de atenção e de estudos, as representações sociais fornecem os elementos que permitem compreender o mundo, gerenciá-lo e, até mesmo, enfrentá-lo. É dentro do referencial teórico da Teoria das Representações Sociais, desenvolvida pelo teórico francês Serge Moscovici e demais autores da área, tais como Denise Jodelet, Jean Claude Abric e outros, que se embasará e se construirá o presente artigo, que tem como objetivo discorrer, por meio de pesquisa bibliográfica, acerca da teoria em voga, dada a importância das representações sociais nas comunicações e nas relações sociais. Conclui-se que, através da análise e da interpretação das representações sociais acerca de determinados objetos, tendo em vista o rico aporte teórico e metodológico da teoria, pode-se obter uma compreensão e uma explicação aprofundadas dos fenômenos sociais, haja vista as funções dessas representações sociais nas práticas em sociedade.

The concept of psychological trauma in psychodynamic French theory: From metaphor to clinical usefulness

This article examines the hermeneutical conceptualization of psychological trauma in contemporary French psychodynamic theory and the clinical importance this approach still holds beyond the community of English-speaking trauma clinicians. Starting with the historical background of the psychodynamic French trauma concept, it investigates the potential contribution to the current knowledge on psychotraumatology internationally and aims to clarify differences and similarities between these approaches in the light of the leading paradigms of today. The position of the psychodynamic contemporary French authors is that stress and trauma do not necessarily fit into the same concept. The French classical and psychodynamic description of psychological trauma is based concepts such as the effroi de la mort (frozen fright of death) and the repetition syndrome (syndrome de répétition). A better understanding of these clinically relevant theories sheds another light on the currently used concepts in mainstream literature and the discussion on PTSD in DSM-5. The comparison of trauma concepts in different cultures and/or language groups, in a context of globalization of trauma societies, could be useful in bridging the existing conceptual gaps, understanding critical differences in clinical practice and offering a more integrative view of psychological trauma.

Cyril Hovorun. Scaffolds of the Church: Towards Poststructural Ecclesiology.

Cyril Hovorun. Scaffolds of the Church: Towards Poststructural Ecclesiology.