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Articles 1 - 25 of 25
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Bergson On Poetics: Philosophy, Literature And Science, Michel Dalissier
Bergson On Poetics: Philosophy, Literature And Science, Michel Dalissier
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In this paper, I analyze Henri Bergson’s insightful and contrasted vision of poetry. First, I show in what sense Bergson sympathizes with the idea that the poet must be credited to surpass the novelist in offering to us an unparalleled emotional apprehension of the world. Second, I nonetheless underline how Bergson grants the product of the poet, i.e., the poem itself, a problematic linguistic status, inasmuch as the focus of his analysis shifts from an intersubjective poetical apprehension of feelings to their individual poetic appreciation, or from the spiritual dimension of poetry to its material dimension. Third, I further suggest …
Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism, Anthony Faramelli, Imogen Piper
Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism, Anthony Faramelli, Imogen Piper
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi have both argued that media ecologies and psychic ecologies are intimately intertwined and as such, any exploration of the collective unconscious must engage with how the mind is formed with and through media. This understanding of networks of interdependence necessitates an exploration of how platformization has impacted users” collective psyche. Drawing from psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari, this article analizes the micropolitics of desire of digital platforms, with an explicit focus on how algorithmic structures amplify extreme Right content, allowing fascisms to metastasis throughout digital spaces. It will first examine the …
The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton
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 …
Language And Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics In Kazuo Ishiguro’S Never Let Me Go, Netty Mattar
Language And Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics In Kazuo Ishiguro’S Never Let Me Go, Netty Mattar
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Netty Mattar discusses in her article “Language and Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” the complexities of ethical compassion in this biotechnological age. Mattar highlights how genetic technology creates new forms of life that dissolve the line between ‘human’ and ‘technology.’ In spite of this, contemporary ethical discussions do not take into account changing conceptions of human subjectivity and instead reinstate older assumptions about what ‘human’ is. Mattar argues that speculative fiction (SF), as a self-conscious play on signs and signification, can draw attention to how ethical responses are determined by the language we use. …
The Symbolism Of Clothing: The Naked Truth About Jacques Lacan, Peter D. Mathews
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 …
A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong
A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Seung-hoon Jeong discusses in his paper global action thrillers about the war on terror. He highlights the biopolitical abjection of counterterrorist agents from their state agencies. This abjection ends up either self-reaffirming in the manner of a sovereign agent (the Bond series) or terrorizing their sovereign system (the Bourne series), while both are trapped in the vicious cycle of terror and counterterror. More notable is the “mind-game” sci-fi genre. Source Code, among others, stages a loop of a traumatic counterterrorist mission with retroactive causality, a closed circuit of neoliberal productivity and pathological abjection in a video-game narrative. The time-travel …
The Others (2001) By Alejandro Amenábar In The Light Of Valentinian Thought, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski
The Others (2001) By Alejandro Amenábar In The Light Of Valentinian Thought, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The article offers a Valentinian interpretation of the Hollywood film The Others (2001). A particular attention is paid to the ways in which cinematic motifs and narrative elements of the film draw on myths, ideas and symbolic imagery present in Valentinian works, especially in the Gospel of Truth (NHC I, 3) and the Gospel of Philip (NHC II, 3). In the course of the heuristic analysis, the paper argues that although the film employs Valentinian ideas, it depicts different understanding of the world. This issue is addressed in the last part of the article by situating the film within broader …
Enduring The Long Take: Tsai Ming-Liang’S Stray Dogs And The Dialectical Image, Louis Lo
Enduring The Long Take: Tsai Ming-Liang’S Stray Dogs And The Dialectical Image, Louis Lo
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This essay attempts to show that Tsai’s Stray Dogs (2013) offers a social critique of Taipei as a neoliberal, global, consumer city, and by so doing establishes a cinema of contemplation through such cinematic devices as the sustained long-take and slow, virtually still cinematic images. By developing Walter Benjamin’s formulation of the dialectical image, this essay explores the extent to which Tsai’s cinematic aesthetics reveals an aspect of the city which cannot be shown otherwise. It argues that his slow cinema creates a potentially revolutionary awakening in an audience accustomed to an immersive mode of cinematic experience which turns the …
Mediating Suffering: Buddhist Detachment And Tantric Responsibility In Michael Ondaatje’S Anil’S Ghost, Justin M. Hewitson
Mediating Suffering: Buddhist Detachment And Tantric Responsibility In Michael Ondaatje’S Anil’S Ghost, Justin M. Hewitson
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In “Mediating Suffering: Buddhist Detachment and Tantric Responsibility in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” Justin Hewitson argues that the global mediation of suffering following human rights abuses creates the offender-victim binary. The way in which moral judgments drive urgent peacemaking is seldom connected to long-term victimhood narratives. This psychology can exacerbate cyclical patterns of anger, exploitation, and violence by deferring responsibility. Ondaatje’s controversial novel, Anil’s Ghost, which reflects these charged accusations, refuses to settle blame on any side of the Sri Lankan conflict; instead, it offers the troubling recognition that offenders, victims, and mediators are all causal agents. Hewitson …
Trespassing Physical Boundaries: Transgression, Vulnerability And Resistance In Sarah Kane’S Blasted (1995), Paula Barba Guerrero, Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo
Trespassing Physical Boundaries: Transgression, Vulnerability And Resistance In Sarah Kane’S Blasted (1995), Paula Barba Guerrero, Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Sarah Kane’s Blasted has been analyzed from various perspectives that address the layers of destruction it exposes. From the questioning of its title and meaning, to the unravelling of the protagonists’ abusive relationship, the analyses have emphasized the depiction of vulnerability as the defining human trait that Jean Ganteau observes in contemporary British literature. However, a key aspect has been overlooked in the critical response to the play: for Kane vulnerability does not equal helplessness, but rather stands in opposition to it. Hence, this article concentrates on how Blasted formulates a new understanding of vulnerability that fits Judith Butler’s later …
Courage And Passion In The Reading Of The Later Foucault Of The Cynics, Inmaculada Hoyos Sanchez
Courage And Passion In The Reading Of The Later Foucault Of The Cynics, Inmaculada Hoyos Sanchez
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article “Courage and Passion in the Reading of the Later Foucault of the Cynics” Inmaculada Hoyos Sánchez aims to determine what role the passions played in the courage of the truth of ancient Cynicism, for which purpose she analyses the lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France in 1984. The hypothesis put forward in this article is that what makes Cynic courage different from other manifestations of the courage of the truth, such as Socratic courage, is that it specifically involves the eradication of shame, a passion that is social and public in character, rather than an …
Foucault And The Recommencement Of Philosophy, Javier De La Higuera
Foucault And The Recommencement Of Philosophy, Javier De La Higuera
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Javier de la Higuera discusses in his “Foucault and the Recommencement of Philosophy” the idea of a recommencement of philosophy that Michel Foucault has posited on several occasions, although with different meaning and intentions. This article reconstructs how he approached this in the 1960s and shows the fundamental changes that this idea of recommencement underwent in the later Foucault. In his last three years at the Collège de France, Foucault appeared to reinterpret the very idea of philosophy based on his analysis of ancient spirituality and of parrhesiastic philosophical practice. The interpretation that Gilles Deleuze gave of late Foucault, devoted …
Of The Processes Of Subjectivation As A Subspecies Of The Event: The Deleuzian Reading Of The Later Foucault, Francisco J. Alcalá
Of The Processes Of Subjectivation As A Subspecies Of The Event: The Deleuzian Reading Of The Later Foucault, Francisco J. Alcalá
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, “On the Processes of Subjectivation as a Subspecies of the Event: the Deleuzian Reading of the Later Foucault” Francisco Alcala discusses the well-known theoretical separation that occurred between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault after the publication of The Will to Knowledge. Deleuze disagreed with the new function that Foucault attributed in this book to the apparatuses of power (to be constitutive of truth) because he considered that such an approach denied an inherent status to the phenomena of resistance, making all reality a truth of power. The aim of this paper is to analyze this controversy: …
Regaining The Subject: Foucault And The Frankfurt School On Critical Subjectivity, Miguel Alirangues
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 …
Literature Of The Self In Foucault: Parrhesia And Autobiographical Discourse, Álvaro Luque
Literature Of The Self In Foucault: Parrhesia And Autobiographical Discourse, Álvaro Luque
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Literature of the Self in Foucault: Parrhesia and Autobiographical Discourse" Álvaro Luque Amo analyzes the framework of Foucault’s study of the technologies of the self. In his study, Michel Foucault analyses the practices of self-writing in the Graeco-Roman period. From this perspective, Foucault approaches the texts of classical authors to interpret what he calls a process of ethopoiesis, or construction of the subject: a subject who tells the truth about himself in the text. Foucault introduces concepts and ideas that are essential to understanding the evolution of autobiography and literature of the self. This article studies …
Jewish Mysticism From Borges To Cirlot: A Transatlantic Approach To The Possibility Of A Non-Subject Subjectivity, Erika Martínez
Jewish Mysticism From Borges To Cirlot: A Transatlantic Approach To The Possibility Of A Non-Subject Subjectivity, Erika Martínez
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article “Jewish Mysticism from Borges to Cirlot,” Erika Martínez discusses the form in which some Latin American and Spanish poets of the twentieth century have experimented, in a disruptive way, with the subjective possibilities of stillness and of time capable of overflowing. Foucault defended, in his last lectures, the construction of a new governmentality of self and of others. Among the many possible technologies to achieve it would be that of the writing of a poetry without words, knowing the insurrectional potentiality of silence. This provides us with a possible starting point for reading the post-secular revision of …
The Eventualization Of Political Thinking: From The Arab Revolutions To The Trump Era, Oscar Barroso
The Eventualization Of Political Thinking: From The Arab Revolutions To The Trump Era, Oscar Barroso
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "The Eventualization of Political Thinking: From the Arab Revolutions to the Trump Era", Óscar Barroso maps out some of the most important contemporary philosophies of the Event: those of Rancière, Badiou, Hardt and Negri and Žižek. These philosophies of the event are defined as post-humanist political proposals that entrust emancipation not to the realization of anthropological ideas but to the emergence of difference. Examining the pessimistic interpretation that these authors make of what has happened since the events of 2011, the author questions whether too much trust has been placed in the supposed virtue of difference and, …
The Ecological Posthuman In Lee's Tarboy And Tan And Ruhemann's The Lost Thing, Başak Ağın
The Ecological Posthuman In Lee's Tarboy And Tan And Ruhemann's The Lost Thing, Başak Ağın
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "The Ecological Posthuman in Lee's [BA1] Tarboy and Tan and Ruhemann's The Lost Thing" Başak Ağın analyzes the posthumanist and ecological elements in two animated short films, James Lee's Tarboy (2009) and Shaun Tan's and Andrew Ruhemann's The Lost Thing (2010). Ağın posits that the two animated short films display a disanthropocentric worldview through the enmeshed relations between humans, techno-sentient beings, and naturalcultural hybrid bodies. The intermingled fusions of these biotic and abiotic forms are inherently characterized by a sense of posthuman ecocriticism. Basing her arguments on the notions of agential realism and new materialisms, Ağın …
About The Concept Of "Gnosticism" In Fiction Studies, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski
About The Concept Of "Gnosticism" In Fiction Studies, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
I In his article "About the Concept of 'Gnosticism' in Fiction Studies" Fryderyk Kwiatkowski notices that in the twentieth-century humanities the concept of Gnosticism has become a popular term for labelling tendencies in modernity and postmodernity. Kwiatkowski argues that the majority of scholars in fiction studies base their research on outdated methodologies. In consequence, Kwiatkowski presents an overview of contemporary approaches in Gnostic studies and discusses how they can be adapted in studies of literature, film, video games, comic books, etc. By outlining advantages and disadvantages of methodological approaches, Kwiatkowski posits that in studies of fiction with Gnostic components it …
A Mid-Range Episode Reading Of Odoevsky's The Cosmorama, Slobodan Sucur
A Mid-Range Episode Reading Of Odoevsky's The Cosmorama, Slobodan Sucur
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "A Mid-range Episode Reading of Odoevsky's The Cosmorama" Slobodan Sucur argues that a focus on David S. Miall's theories of foregrounding and the mid-range episode may help to minimize ambiguities and contradictions that often emerge in readings of Gothic literature. The example focused on in the article is Vladimir Odoevsky's 1839 novella The Cosmorama. Sucur elaborates on the idea that the fantastic and sublime are naturally reader-receptive and anticipate some aspects of Miall's theory. In relation to this Sucur also discusses the possibility that mid-range episode reading may help bridge the gap between some tenets …
Said And The Mythmaking Of Auerbach's Mimesis, Hyeryung Hwang
Said And The Mythmaking Of Auerbach's Mimesis, Hyeryung Hwang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Said and the Mythmaking of Auerbach's Mimesis" Hyeryung Hwang revisits critical debates on Edward W. Said's unwitting participation in the mythmaking of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and analyzes the degree to which critical discourse overlook what Said actually wanted to revive, namely the spirit of philological methodology. Hwang argues that before Said worked on Mimesis, the book already acquired a sort of myth. Hwang attempts to go beyond the commonly held understanding of philology and suggest it as a methodology for historical synthesis whose dialectical tension between texts and history amounts to the synthesis of "fact" …
Hesse's Steppenwolf As Modern Ethical Fiction, Michał Koza
Hesse's Steppenwolf As Modern Ethical Fiction, Michał Koza
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Hesse's Steppenwolf as Modern Ethical Fiction" Michał Koza discusses the significance of "ethical fiction" in modern literature. Such fiction, according to Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, are not only milestones of ethical thinking, but more importantly offer a narrative for self-creation as an ethical subject. Harry Haller, the protagonist of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, is a man living on the border of modern subjectivity embodying a cultural and existential crisis. Koza argues that "ethical reading" enables one to see the relation between philosophy and literature that not only enter in a dialogue with each other, but also share …
Situating A Badiouian Anthropocene In Hagiwara's Postnatural Poetry, Dean A. Brink
Situating A Badiouian Anthropocene In Hagiwara's Postnatural Poetry, Dean A. Brink
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Situating a Badiouian Anthropocene in Hagiwara's Postnatural Poetry" Dean A. Brink discusses the ecological dimension of the poetry of one of the founding voices in modern Japanese poetry, Sakutarō Hagiwara (1886-1942). Brink argues that Hagiwara developed a poetics characterized by engagements with nonhuman organisms and actants to situate the materiality of these actants in ways that diffuse the binary of "language" and "nature" and present a postnatural relationality that Bruno Latour describes. Drawing on the recent work of Alain Badiou, Brink explores materialist alternatives to representationalism—including the Lacanian triangle of the imaginary real and symbolic—by emphasizing human-nonhuman …
Akedah, The Holocaust, And The Limits Of The Law In Roth's "Eli, The Fanatic", Aimee L. Pozorski
Akedah, The Holocaust, And The Limits Of The Law In Roth's "Eli, The Fanatic", Aimee L. Pozorski
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Akedah, the Holocaust, and the Limits of the Law in Roth's 'Eli, the Fanatic'" Aimee L. Pozorski argues that Philip Roth's 1957 short story dramatizes the tension between the law on the one hand and the philosophy of ethics, on the other hand with the story's protagonist ultimately choosing ethics as evidenced by his identification with a displaced Hasidic Jew near the story's end. In reading the story through the inter-textual references to the Genesis story of the Akedah, Pozorski discusses the limits of the law in the face of vulnerable children and within the context of …
Conservative Evolution, Sustainability, And Culture, Gábor Náray-Szabó
Conservative Evolution, Sustainability, And Culture, Gábor Náray-Szabó
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Conservative Evolution, Sustainability, and Culture" Gábor Náray-Szabó argues that evolution is conservative in the sense that throughout the history of the universe old constructs like elementary particles, amino acids, and living cells remained conserved while the world evolved/evolves in complexity. A similar process can be observed in cultural evolution as components of society and culture continue to evolve. Considering the increasing pressure on natural resources by material consumption, a close alliance between past, present, and future generations is unavoidable and thus Náray-Szabó posits that concepts of conservative evolution and sustainability are related. However, in order to avoid …