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Full-Text Articles in European Languages and Societies

The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton Jun 2022

The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq James Dutton “reads” identity and race from the point of view of technics. Namely, he does so through the work of two nominally “Eurocentric” authors, Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, observing how familial and racial resemblance is a living inscription of “lost time.” This inscription comes about through the technical means available to and constitutive of the categories which bind them. Thus, instead of furthering unfinishable racial distinctions which only serve to support discourses of racism, this article follows assertions made in the novels of …


The Symbolism Of Clothing: The Naked Truth About Jacques Lacan, Peter D. Mathews Feb 2022

The Symbolism Of Clothing: The Naked Truth About Jacques Lacan, Peter D. Mathews

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In the work of Jacques Lacan there exists an extended metaphor of clothing, whereby the ‘naked’ truth is always ‘clothed’ in deception. For Lacan, clothing functions at the intersection of the symbolic and the imaginary, with outward appearance shaping what we imagine to be underneath in order to determine the landscape of symbolic desire. Joan Copjec considers the political implications of this metaphor, arguing that utilitarianism, in particular, divides desire into a false dichotomy of rational, naked desire, and the ornamental clothing of irrationality, a mindset woven into both capitalism and French colonialism. The article then examines two examples from …


Infidelity As Reality: Re-Staging The Global South With Abbas Kiarostami’S Close-Up, Sinan Richards Sep 2019

Infidelity As Reality: Re-Staging The Global South With Abbas Kiarostami’S Close-Up, Sinan Richards

Artl@s Bulletin

In this article, we contend that, in the fields of art and visual culture, the Global South is both an elaborate lie and a radical opportunity for transformation. We investigate Kiarostami’s Close-up alongside Lacan’s psychoanalysis to show how Close-up’s filmic narrative evokes the same ‘polyvalence’ and ‘slipperiness’ as the notion of the Global South. We argue that Kiarostami’s Close-up retroactively changed Sabzian’s fate, and in so doing, Kiarostami’s re-staging actively overwrites History itself. We read the same narrative move in the concept of the Global South to suggest that the Global South adopts the Kiarostamian strategy of infidelity as reality …


Regaining The Subject: Foucault And The Frankfurt School On Critical Subjectivity, Miguel Alirangues Dec 2018

Regaining The Subject: Foucault And The Frankfurt School On Critical Subjectivity, Miguel Alirangues

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Regaining the Subject: Foucault and the Frankfurt School on Critical Subjectivity” Miguel Alirangues sketches a possible meeting place in which two currents of critical thought (Adorno and Horkheimer, on the one hand, and Foucault, on the other) can come into dialogue. Without these two currents and, more crucially, without the dialogue between them, as he points out, we cannot today think of political antagonism towards the social structures of domination and therefore we cannot think of praxis and agency. The essay proceeds as follows: firstly, the author notes the places in which Foucault spoke of his relationship …