Living With the Other's Pain: The Ethical Implications of Mitsein in Simone de Beauvoir's Le sang des autres

This article establishes that the suffering of the other represents a serious philosophical and ethical problem in Beauvoir's first post–World War II novel. In fact, the other's suffering poses such a complex problem in Le sang des autres particularly because Beauvoir depicts her characters’ world as a kind of Mitsein, which is Heidegger's word to describe how our lives necessarily intertwine with and envelop the lives of others while still allowing for the existential experience of separation. In the novel, the main characters’ potential responses to the other's suffering—quietism, indifference, charity, and empathy—fail according to the novel's existentialist ethical framework because of the ways these responses deny the fundamental ambiguity of Beauvoirian Mitsein. Only in accepting separation and connection as codependent ethical values do the characters find an ethically palatable response to the other's suffering at the end of the novel.     

From the Absent Mother to the Oppressive Mother to the New Mother in Lucía Etxebarria's Un milagro en equilibrio

This article examines the transformation of maternal and paternal images that occurs in Lucía Etxebarria's 2004 novel Un milagro en equilibrio. Sandra Schumm argues that the novel engages and transforms the postwar archetype of the “absent mother.” Using Schumm's study as a springboard, my article takes this argument further by showing how Etxebarria rewrites a second maternal archetype, the “oppressive mother,” a figure that symbolizes patriarchal values and the Francoist regime in many postwar narratives by women. At first, protagonist Eva Agulló characterizes her mother, Eva Benayas, as one of these oppressive mothers, a characterization that Etxebarria has also employed in her two most famous novels to date, Amor curiosidad, prozac y dudas and Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes. Un milagro en equilibrio marks a change in Etxebarria's treatment of mothers because, as the novel progresses, Agulló questions and then complicates this portrayal. The Benayas that emerges is a complex woman influenced by personal, familial, and national conflicts. Conversely, Agulló's father comes to assume more culpability for family abuse and dysfunction as Agulló associates him with Francoism. This reassessment of maternal and paternal roles demonstrates Etxebarria's own evolution in maternal representations as it dialogues with and recreates previous works such as Ana María Moix's 1969 novel Julia and Ana María Matute's 1959 Primera memoria and 1969 La trampa—three foundational novels that also employ tyrannical maternal figures. In rejecting the oppressive mother role she had assigned to her mother, Agulló rewrites a long history of maternal figures associated with the Francoist regime in many postwar narratives by women.     

STALINISM IN RETROSPECT: HANNAH ARENDT

Established writers whose reputation is affixed to a particular line of argument are typically ill disposed to change their minds in public. Some authors sincerely believe that the historical record vindicates them. Others are determined that the historical record will vindicate them. Still others ignore the historical record. Among students of totalitarianism, no one had more at stake reputationally than Hannah Arendt. It is not just that The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) established her as the premier thinker on its topic. It is also that totalitarianism, as she understood it, ribbons through all of her subsequent books, from the discussion of “the social” in The Human Condition (1958) to the analysis of thinking in the posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1978). How ready was she to adapt or to change entirely arguments she had first formulated as early as the mid‐to‐late 1940s? “Stalinism in Retrospect,” her contribution to Columbia University's Seminar on Communism series, offers a rare opportunity to answer, at least partially, this question. Arendt's foil was the publication of recent books on Stalin and the Stalin era by three Russian witnesses: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Roy Medvedev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. According to Arendt, the books meshed with her own theoretical conception of Bolshevism while changing the “whole taste” of the period: they contained new insights into the nature of totalitarian criminality and evil. “Stalinism in Retrospect” documents Arendt's arguments and challenges to them by a number of the seminar's participants. Of particular note is the exchange between her and Zbigniew Brzezinski, an expert on the Soviet Union, a major interpreter of totalitarianism in his own right, and soon to be President Carter's National Security Advisor (January 1977–January 1981). Notes by the editor, Peter Baehr, offer a critical context for understanding Arendt's argument.     

List of figures

Although the general historical context of Christine de Pizan's Livre du corps de policie (LCP), the Orleanist-Burgundian feud occasioned by the periodic insanity of King Charles VI, has long been recognised, the precise argument that the author wages through her unique configuration of the third part of the body politic has not been explored. This essay reads the LCP as an intervention into the escalating struggle for power between Charles VI's brother, the duke of Orleans, and his cousin, the duke of Burgundy. Christine's purpose emerges most clearly in her peculiar arrangement of the third part of her body politic, le peuple, where two points bear particular consideration: her inclusion of the University and her division of the ‘merchants’ across two separate categories, a repartition which seems to refer to the contemporary distinction between the highly-placed merchants of Paris and the butchers. Christine seems to be arguing that if the University were to make common cause with the ruling burghers and well-placed merchants, they could force into submission their more restless brothers and sisters, the butchers and their thuggish followers, whom the duke of Burgundy would finally convince to rise up in 1413 in what has become known as the Cabochian Revolt.     

Expressing Islamic feminism in Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter

This article examines the presence of a strictly Qur'anic base shaping the Islamic feminism of Ramatoulaye, the narrator and main protagonist of Mariama Bâ's francophone classic So Long a Letter (1979). I argue that the widely circulated insistence by critics and readers of Bâ's epistolary style novel on the practice of Islam in West Africa, particularly in Senegal, as a syncretic presence eagerly adapting to indigenous non-Islamic beliefs and practice, has led to an overly generalized and somewhat inaccurate perception of Islam in Africa. Through my reading of some key Islamic concepts described in Bâ's novel, such as the mirath, polygamy, prayer and sunna, I situate my reading of Ramatoulaye's expression of Islamic feminism within an African and Islamic feminist reading and further position these within the cultural context of the practice of Islam in Senegal. By her ‘strategic self-positioning’, as defined by Islamic feminist Miriam Cooke, among others, within a small group of Senegalese Muslims – locally known as ibadu Muslims – Ramatoulaye succeeds in enacting Islamic feminism in her spiritual persistence for a strict adherence to the Qur'an and in her resistance to the temptation to expand the Islamic precepts of her faith.     

Death at St Bernard's: Anti-vivisection,Medicine and the Gothic

Displaying a Gothic fascination with the misapplication of science, Edward Berdoe's St Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student (1887) was one of a number of novels in the 1880s that repackaged the horrors of vivisection for public consumption. Although the novel can be dismissed as derivative, it departed from standard themes found in other anti-vivisection texts. Through the device of a hero struggling with the moral implications of science and the reckless treatment of patients, St Bernard's challenged the legitimacy of the teaching hospital. The present article moves debate about the Gothic, literature and science beyond well-known texts by Stevenson and Wells to examine how St Bernard's combined ‘the methods of science with the methods of romance’ and shifted the anti-vivisection narrative into the hospital. In locating the novel within anti-vivisectionist uses of fiction and late-Victorian anxieties about experimental medicine and the teaching hospital, the article explores the novel's relationship with other anti-vivisection texts and Gothic fiction, and examines what it says about scientific practices and mentalities. St Bernard's fashioned a very different hospital from existing representations to warn readers of how brutish students and cruel doctors tortured patients. In doing so, the novel recast the teaching hospital as an uncanny and dangerous place.     

Compassionate Protector of America: The Symbolism of Old Hickory in a Jackson Woman's Mind

Serving as America's only female newspaper editor during the election of 1832, Anne Royall became possibly the first public “Jackson Woman” by supporting the chief executive's bid for re-election in her sheet titled Paul Pry. A closer look at Royall's recollections from her travels in Alabama from 1818 to 1822 shows her to be a blooming “Jackson Woman” developing before the Jackson party was even conceived. In 1828, Royall's Black Books produced a scathing indictment of American society. Both the Adams and Jackson campaigns actively recruited her for their mud-slinging contest but she declined. Three years later Royall started printing Paul Pry. The Black Books and Paul Pry gave Royall a public voice, and she was not afraid to use it. Between 1818 and 1832, Anne Royall went from being a Jackson admirer to being a public Jackson woman.     

The Feasibility of Teaching Scientific and Technical Russian without the Prerequisite of a General Russian Language Course

The plot of the short novel La mano en la trampa (Beatriz Guido, 1961) is about a young woman who becomes a heroine while trying to find out the truth about a family secret known as “El Opa.” Her work as a spy needs to be done in complete secrecy. Her family is behind her and she needs to escape from censorship. Her family story is similar to Argentina's context at that time when many people had to avoid the control and excessive power of Peron's government. Everything seems to be double in this novel: spaces, characters, life stories, ghosts, vampires, haunting and repressive atmospheres. All of these elements contribute to the gothic spirit in La mano en la trampa that I explore in this article.     

Teresa de Ávila: Portrait of the saint as a young woman

ABSTRACT

Teresa de Jesús (known as Teresa de Ávila in the English-speaking world) began life in a comfortable, merchant-class family. The daughter and granddaughter of conversos, she was one of twelve children (two from the first marriage of Don Alonso de Cepeda, Teresa's father, and ten from the second). She received a good education for a girl of her period and class, probably learning to read and write from parents and tutors, and then studying at a convent boarding school. She undoubtedly learned the importance of letter writing from her father, as business in early modern Europe was conducted largely through correspondence. Although traditional biographers paint a romanticized view of Teresa's girlhood, a careful reading of her Vida, letters, and other documents reveals that there were many strains on the Cedepa-Ahumada household. Among the causes were the Cepedas' deteriorating financial situation, societal pressures on conversos, the death of Teresa's mother, tensions among the siblings, the departure of Teresa's brothers for the New World, and Teresa's illness.     

Des Considérations inactuelles au coeur de l'Occupation: Le Cogito à rebours d'Hélène Berr

Written in Paris during the darkest moments of the German Occupation, but only published in 2008, Hélène Berr's Journal was immediately hailed for its dramatic testimony and striking insights. With precision and lucidity, the young Jewish student at the Sorbonne records the human tragedies unfolding all around her in the wake of the Holocaust, while at the same time reviewing her own manner of experiencing these traumatic events through her personal reflections and emotions. The present article analyses her astute and poignant observations in the light of Emmanuel Lévinas's notion of the ethically grounded subject. Beyond its documentary value, Hélène Berr's Journal thus takes on significant philosophical dimensions. At the same time, Lévinas's concept of the Other's incursion into the realm of the self proves to be firmly anchored in the firsthand experience of the twentieth century's greatest historical catastrophe.

Écrit aux jours les plus sombres de l'Occupation de Paris, mais publié en 2008 seulement, le Journal d'Hélène Berr s'est tout de suite présenté comme un insigne témoignage. De manière aussi précise que perspicace, Hélène note les drames qui se déroulent tout autour d'elle tout en revenant sur tout ce qu'elle parvient à vivre et à penser au jour le jour. Nous nous proposons de lire ce Journal à la lumière d'Emmanuel Lévinas et de découvrir ainsi la profondeur non seulement humaine mais aussi philosophique de ce carnet intime tout en confirmant l'ancrage de la pensée de l'Autre dans le vécu historique de la plus grande catastrophe du XXième siècle.     

Oracular Ventriloquism: Political Theology in The Female American

ABSTRACT

This essay scrutinizes a scene of colonial religious conversion that appears in the pseudonymous 1767 novel, The Female American. The protagonist's use of ventriloquism and indigenous technology to create the illusion of divine intervention is considered in the light of Carl Schmitt's suggestion that secular political power inherits and translates forms of pre-modern theological authority. The novel's dual investments in proto-feminist literary representation and Anglican missionary proselytism are in tension with one another and help to explain the central character's ambivalence toward her inventive mode of conversion. Hence, the novel dramatizes the Euro-colonial disavowal of theological and decisionist force while, at the same time, hinting at the democratizing potential of forms of fictional address.     

Marie Redonnet's L'Accord de paix: The question of resistance and the turn-of-the-millennium novel

This article discusses how Marie Redonnet's 2000 novel L'Accord de paix addresses the question of resisting the ideology of turn-of-the-millennium consumer society. It takes its bearings from Redonnet's explicit points de repère (Genet's travesty of the symbolic order, Debord's integrated spectacle and Sartrean engagement) and from the intersection of her critical works with Cixous's criture féminine and Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires. The discussion identifies how L'Accord de paix converges with and diverges from these writers' differing conceptions of agency, and how Redonnet self-reflexively seeks to counter appropriation by the order she seeks to oppose. Situating the questions of misogyny and difference within the question of resisting turn-of-the-millennium symbolic violence, it reveals a literary commitment that simultaneously harnesses the legacy of the past and makes a travesty of the market-driven symbolic order of the present. The article argues that by transmitting the responsibility for resistance from writer to readers, Redonnet inscribes in storytelling a hope for discovering new bearings for the future.     

Politics and Public Policy

Abstract

In the figure of Judge Holden, Cormac McCarthy has crafted perhaps the most haunting character in all of American literature. The antagonist of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Holden is a richly composed portrait of human evil responsible for a litany of wicked deeds. This essay attempts to expound the character of judge Holden, to the end of clarifying McCarthy's definition of evil. It argues that McCarthy, with the judge, lays bare the contours of soul of the evil man, focusing especially on the tension between his ambitious repudiation of justice, on the one hand, and his steadfast, if unwitting, adherence to it, on the other. It is the evil man's conception of the purpose of knowledge, together with his desire to acquire boundless knowledge, that is the key to this tension in his soul.     

Euripidea. Collected essays

In the last thirty years historians of republicanism have offered us the image of Harrington as the true hero of Machiavellism. This paper suggests instead that Harrington adopted Machiavelli's method in political science, but shared only few of his master's values, often referring to those cherished in anti-Machiavellian circles, as in the case of the agrarian laws. Indebted to the anti-Machiavellian Petrus Cunaeus's analysis of the Jewish Jubilee laws, Harrington transformed Cunaeus's specific observations into a general law of his own political science. This paper emphasizes the originality and modernity of such science, based on the inextricable interconnectedness between politics and economics. Further, it argues that this science entails a new, post-Machiavellian theory of liberty and property.     

Ardent Service: Female Eroticism and New Life Ethics in Gertrude Dix's The Image Breakers (1900)

Gertrude Dix's socialist-feminist novel, The Image Breakers (1895) has perplexed twentieth-century critics by its brief, short-circuited representation of homoerotic affection between the two female protagonists. In answer, this essay roots the women's relationship in the wider social, historical context of New Life politics and ethics in the 1890s. Members of the Fellowship of the New Life heralded not merely a variety of alternative lifestyles including vegetarianism and co-education, but also extensive discussion about sexual mindfulness and generosity. The charismatic seer and inspiration for the FNL, James Hinton, preached that utopia could be achieved by practicing an erotically-charged altruism. If, as Sharon Marcus has claimed, such female mutual devotion was common and perceived as normative, it was particularly affirmed by ethical-socialist culture. In the novel, Leslie Ardent's loving service to Rosalind is fuelled by her political mission and desire for self-realization. Through this female intimacy, Dix evokes the initial phase of New Life socialism as Hinton and his followers had espoused it. By contrast, the women's heterosexual relationships are more troubling, as male comrades pressure them respectively into heterosexual marriage and free love. In order to discredit heterosexual free love, Dix paints its proponent as a disturbed anarchist, rather than admit that historically some in ethical-socialist circles had advocated polyamoury. Nor does she acknowledge the philosophical convergences between collective anarchism and ethical socialism at the fin de siècle, though she herself was engaged in radical communities. Through her indictment of free love, Dix punctures the utopian vision of a pure, selfless, erotic affection flowing between individuals; figuratively, the novel re-enacts the collapse of Hinton's own reputation from seer to seducer. Echoing scenarios by other female ethical-socialist writers, the early intimacy between Rosalind and Leslie then serves the function of nostalgia, symbolizing a now-lost stage of New Life optimism and association.     

Heroic Power in Thomas Carlyle and Leo Tolstoy

This paper explores two opposed paradigmatic approaches to heroic power: Thomas Carlyle's versus Leo Tolstoy's. In On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1840), Carlyle argues for its crucial importance, whereas in War and Peace (1869), Tolstoy denies its very possibility. Carlyle's heroic model attributes to the hero (the leader) a high degree of mastery and control over social and political circumstances, whereas Tolstoy's a-heroic model implies a small degree of personal mastery and much greater constraints on the individual leader. Both models achieved prominence in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, which brought the role of the individual (hero) in history to the forefront of intellectual and political debate throughout Europe. The two models are shown as parts of and important links in long-established traditions; they are internally coherent yet totally contradictory of each other. The comparison of these opposed perceptions of heroic figures in history suggests that they might originate in an ambivalent, polarized perception of power and mastery, and in the sense of individual insecurity in the face of historical upheavals.     

‘If You Find Out Who Her Father is I Would Be Interested to Know’ The Kwermin in an Eastern Min Context

In this paper the peripheral position of the Kwermin in the Min regional context is discussed through a focus on two gift‐presentations, those of bridewealth and those presented to fully initiated men at the end of their initiatory process. The items of the traditional bridewealth gifts are discussed as well as the debate that emerged, after the discontinuation of this traditional presentation, whether Kwermin should take up the large bridewealth payments introduced from the highland Bimin or go back to an earlier custom of sister‐exchange (abu) between clans without great emphasis on bridewealth. However, it is suggested that the present day monetary claims, without their actual payment, may eventually serve to strengthen the previous practice of abu. The gifts presented following full initiation are referred to as Afek's pubic hair and it is shown how these presentations can be understood as being Afek, or essential aspects of this highland's originating ancestor, creating novices as true men who are then presented to Afek in a way similar to the way wives are presented to husbands. It is suggested that such presentation of man to ancestress partly explains patriarchal Kwermin men's reluctance to fully accept highland ideology, preferring to maintain their allegiance with the cultural hero of the lower mountains and the lowlands, Webnok.     

Cultural Hybridity,Magical Realism,and the Language of Magic in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist

Sister Francisca de la Concepción (Mother Castillo), a Neogranadine nun, articulated multiple, powerful discourses in her works Mi vida and Afectos espirituales. In what I call a "hegemonic confessional discourse," visible throughout her mystical works, the Spanish-American colonial nun affirmed the Iberian colonization and Catholic evangelization of the New Kingdom of Granada by accepting and supporting the Spanish's violent and discriminatory hegemony.

I will defend the aforementioned thesis by analyzing Mi vida and Afectos espirituales, using the construction of Otherness and an explanation of various mystical processes, and by scrutinizing Mother Castillo's social, economic, political, and religious views, as well as her Catholic orthodox, white, traditional perspective.     

Sir Charles Grandison,Natural Law and the Fictionalised English Gentleman

This article enquires into the relation between enlightened humanist conceptions of natural law and the period novel's fictionalization of the English gentleman in the context of its marriage plot. Marriage played a key role in enlightened theorisations of natural law precisely as an institution capable of grounding familial and civil life in an emerging concept of human nature. Yet public debate about the state's role in the regulation of marriage in mid-eighteenth-century England demonstrates that natural law lent itself to very different models of sovereignty and governance. The antinomies that characterized natural law's circulation in the English context are uniquely fictionalized in Samuel Richardson's last novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), a lengthy parallel narrative of failed courtship and matrimonial felicity that draws upon Pufendorf's model of natural law, yet is only partly implicated in its secular humanism. The novel's eponymous gentleman hero – a ‘Man of Religion and Virtue’ – exemplifies a mix of Anglican piety, civic virtue and disinterested sympathy that is sanctioned by natural law and sealed by the English marriage plot.