Cleansing Les Halles: Discourses of Health and Disease in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris

The analysis of hygiene and nutrition in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre will guide us to the relationship his characters establish with their own bodies and with existence, as well as clarify the liaison between that of the intimate and the social. Undoubtedly, Beckettian bodies are willingly badly known, poorly treated, and continually exposed to degradation. However, scorn over nutrition and sleaziness toward hygiene allow an époché of the body that consents to the enlargement of the space of consciousness.     

“Words fail us”: Beckett,Leacock, and Johnson

ABSTRACT

This article will look at political treatments of language in Samuel Beckett’s early novel Watt and place the novel’s linguistic scepticism in conversation with three authors, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the language theorist Felix Mauthner, and the English-born, Canadian parodist Stephen Leacock. The paper will argue that Beckett, like Leacock, engages in Mauthnerian critiques of language, destabilising Johnsonian formulae for language standardisation. But while Leacock fails to develop the political implications of his critique of language, Beckett’s understanding of language standardisation is implicitly political, informed by Johnson’s conception of speech as the predicate of national identity, a standard for inclusion which Watt gleefully antagonises. Challenging nationalist calls for controls on language, Watt interrogates the ways that campaigns for linguistic unity will engender exclusionary attitudes towards the nonconforming and bar access to that speech and identity which falls outside of normative frameworks.     

The ethico-politics of homo-ness: Beckett's How It Is and Casement's Black Diaries

In recent years, Beckett studies has taken an ‘ethical turn’ as critics have given increased attention to the status of the Other and otherness in the writer's oeuvre. How It Is, a key text for these critics, was written as Beckett was reading the newly published Black Diaries of Roger Casement, a volume that contains homoerotic content long considered scandalous for the Irish republican icon and yet offers a remarkable vision of social relations structured around sameness or what Leo Bersani calls ‘homo-ness’. Reading Beckett's novel alongside Casement's diaries reveals the significance of How It Is for thinking an ethico-politics that depends neither on the ideological foundations of the nation-state nor on critical perspectives that emphasise the primacy of difference, but rather on a fundamental reorientation of sociality. In this regard, Beckett's anti-redemptive narrative may be considered a work of penetrating utopian writing, which nonetheless reminds us of the hazards of utopian thought.     

“Godforsaken hole called … called …”: place,nation, and spatial crisis in Beckett’s fiction and drama

This essay explores how the figuring of place throughout the fiction and drama of Samuel Beckett registers and critiques narratives of place in Irish nationalist discourse. The Irish place-names of Beckett’s texts are read in relation to a toponymic re-territorialisation in post-independence Ireland, a process which enervated place identities synonymous with a Protestant culture and history. In this way, the essay argues that the celebrated “placelessness” of Beckett’s work and the collapse of spatial agency experienced by his protagonists is informed by the construction of nation-space in the country of the author’s early life. The preponderance of scatological place-names in the Beckett oeuvre is approached in these terms and read as a mode of resistance to the self-sacrifice to nation demanded in emplacement.     

Pismires and Protestants: the ‘lingering dissolution’ of Samuel Beckett's All That Fall

Samuel Beckett's radio play All That Fall presents an Ireland in which the traditional lines of sectarian division are unravelling. The blurring of difference that ensues is symptomatic of the curious state of suspension implied by the title of the play, which both suggests and withholds the promise that ‘The Lord upholdeth all that fall’. This ‘lingering dissolution’ stabilises in a peculiarly indiminishable life force, reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze's notion of vitalism, which serves to reveal the unifying singularity underlying all distinct identities. However, while the play points out the illusory origin of sectarian (as other) division, it also acknowledges that such division will always, inevitably arise.     

Godot’s Shakespeare

While the connection between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and King Lear has become something of a critical commonplace, references to other Shakespeare plays can also be found throughout. This essay traces Godot’s debt to two plays in particular. First it argues how Godot not only draws on Hamlet’s graveyard scene for macabre imagery, but how it also construes an extended meta-theatrical parody of Hamlet’s soliloquies about the contrast between acting and talking/thinking. The second half of the essay proposes a number of connections with The Tempest, and specifically with its “salvage and deformed slave” Caliban. It argues how the figure of Caliban not merely functions as a model for a colonial power-dynamic that can be seen to operate here and elsewhere in Beckett, but how Caliban is equally significant as a lyrical figure whose great speech about sleeping, waking, and dreaming informs Beckett’s play in a number of ways.     

Antiquarianism,archaeology, and aporetic immanence in Beckett’s prose

Beckett derides those antiquarians unaware of “the rupture of the lines of communication” between subject and object in his 1934 essay “Recent Irish Poetry”. However, Beckett will come to incorporate into the late prose specific terminology used by archaeologist, including those involved in the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, who were contemporaries of the same antiquarians he scorns so contemptuously in his early career. This paper traces and examines the Irish antiquarian elements in relation to megalithic archaeology in Beckett’s prose. The elements of antiquarian archaeology in Beckett function to present the existence of those populating the work as mediated by the aporia between ancient and modern epochs. Allusions to antiquarian and archeological terminology contribute to the issues of representation in Beckett’s work. Instances where historical material resides in Beckett’s prose will be analysed through the logic of reverberation. Based on the physics of sound, it will be argues that the fragments of historical material act like artefacts which do not represent historical discourse but reverberate within an aporia of chronological time.     

SUCCESS,TRUTH, AND MODERNISM IN HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY: READING SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER THIRTY‐FIVE YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF METAHISTORY1

This essay provides a close reading of Saul Friedländer's exceptionally successful comprehensive history of the Holocaust from the theoretical perspective of Hayden White's philosophy of history. Friedländer's The Years of Extermination has been celebrated as the first synthetic history of the “Final Solution” that acknowledges the experiences of the victims of Nazi genocide. But Friedländer has not simply added the voices of the victims to a conventional historical account of the Holocaust. Instead, by displacing linear notions of time and space and subtly deconstructing conventional concepts of causality, he has invented a new type of historical prose that performs rather than analyzes the victims' point of view. Friedländer's innovation has particularly radical consequences for the construction of historical explanations. On the one hand, Friedländer explicitly argues that anti‐Semitism was the single most important cause of the Holocaust. On the other hand, his transnational, multifaceted history of the “Final Solution” provides a wealth of data that escapes the conceptual grasp of his explicit model of causation. Friedländer chooses this radically self‐reflexive strategy of historical representation to impress on the reader the existential sense of disbelief with which the victims experienced Nazi persecution. To Friedländer, that sense of disbelief constitutes the most appropriate ethical response to the Holocaust. Thus the narratological analysis of The Years of Extermination reveals that the exceptional quality of the book, as well as presumably its success, is the result of an extraordinarily creative act of narrative imagination. Or, put into terms developed by White, who shares Friedländer's appreciation of modernist forms of writing, The Years of Extermination is the first modernist history of the Holocaust that captures, through literary figuration, an important and long neglected reality of the “Final Solution.”     

“And There Renew the Kingship”: The Double Coronation of Saul (1 Samuel 10-11)

This article deals with the two accounts of Saul's coronation that appear in I Sam 10-11. As opposed to the traditional critical approach, I propose a literary perspective, positing that both coronation episodes belong to a single story that is developed by means of concentric parallelism. The concentric structure of the accounts (which indicates a reversal in the conception of monarchy), the strange and unique literary formulations, and the other well-known literary devices such as analogies and leitwort all flesh-out the ideal character of the king of Israel. This is done while establishing Saul's character as the perfect king, who is worthy to lead. The purpose of the story is to teach the proper approach to understanding the status of the king of Israel, and to show that at this stage of the story Saul recognizes his limitations as a flesh-and-blood king who is aware of God's role as the leader and savior of the Nation of Israel.     

WRITING THE HISTORY OF SPINOZISM

In this essay I reflect on Knox Peden's Spinoza contra Phenomenology, a history of French rationalist Spinozism in the mid‐twentieth century. The book marks an important intervention in modern French and European intellectual history, depicting the importance of Baruch Spinoza's thought in the negotiation of and resistance to the phenomenology that captivated much of twentieth‐century French intellectual life. With philosophical and historical sophistication, Peden tells the story of several relatively overlooked thinkers while also providing substantially new contexts and interpretations of the well‐known Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze. While accounting for Peden's major accomplishment, my aim is also to situate his work among a number of recent works in the history of Spinozism in order to reflect on the specific methodological questions that pertain to the widely varying appropriations of Spinoza's thought since the seventeenth century. In particular, I reflect on Peden's claim that Spinoza's thought cannot provide an actionable politics, a claim that runs counter to nearly two centuries of leftist forms of Spinozism. I offer a short account of some of the ways that theorists have mobilized Spinoza's thought for political purposes, redefining “action” itself in Spinozist terms. I then conclude by reflecting on the dimensions of Spinoza's thought (and recent interpretations of it) that make it possible for such significantly different claims about its political potential to be credible.     

‘The Pathos of Conservation’: Raphael Samuel and the politics of heritage

When Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture was published in 1994, it was critically received. Yet, the book has not had the impact of other key works such as Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) or Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987). A number of factors have contributed to this, such as Theatres essentially being an unfinished project, and ‘heritage’ in the book having multiple personas – the net result being that Samuel’s arguments can at times be hard to pin down. Yet with interest in his approach to heritage now growing, this article seeks to unravel Samuel’s core ideas and arguments pertaining to heritage, and to give an historical background to their evolution. With the central tenets of Samuel’s argument essentially being a case for the democratisation of heritage; the validity of what we might today call ‘unofficial’ narratives and discourses; and to challenge the dominant view that heritage was ultimately history’s poor cousin, I argue that Samuel’s ideas have much to offer contemporary research agendas in heritage.     

Wem gehört Adam Smith? Gedanken zur Auseinandersetzung um das geistige Erbe des schottischen Philosophen und Ökonomen

Smith's appropriation by neoliberal theorists as the progenitor of economic liberalism and capitalism has recently been challenged by a phalanx of counter‐positions. In a concerted effort ?to salvage the real Smith’?, they rediscover the enlightenment philosopher who was very critical of ostentatious display of wealth and envisioned a society based on moral concerns rather than on the pursuit of self‐interest. This article discusses recent developments in the battle over the economist's and philosopher's heritage.     

APHASIA,HISTORY, AND DURESS

This essay celebrates the publication of Duress, explores its concepts and themes, focuses on the way Ann Stoler rejects the notion of historical forgetting and develops a heuristic of “colonial aphasia” in an ethnographic chapter on the emergence of France's Far Right near Marseille in the 1990s. The essay also tracks how postcolonial scholars are using the notion of aphasia, drawing on Stoler's colonial usages in contexts like the Netherlands and Britain as well as using the notion to periodize. Those who came to aphasia before and without Stoler are also present here, and their contributions suggest a range of ways to think through radical, countercultural, and philosophical thought. That Gilles Deleuze and Paolo Virno use aphasia in contrary ways suggests that once aphasia departs from clinical settings, its poetics are rather up for grabs even if contained within activist gestures; both rethink matters of politics, dissent, and language. The example of Kurt Goldstein is also imported to show that clinical aphasia may go with the “detours” of patients, those stricken by war, catastrophe, and these peculiar speech disorders. That “detour” is also a Deleuzian word opens wide a “minor” register to history, speech, and forms of oppression. The semantic spectrum for aphasia in histories of politics and language is wide, from Stoler's colonial version that applies most to the privileged, to Deleuze's poetic transpositions that propose aphasia as an accomplishment, a rebellious refusal of communication. Aphasia has much promise as a historical category in and outside of colonial forms of duress.     

“AND DAVID PERCEIVED” (2 SAMUEL 5,2)

Abstract

2 Samuel 5,12 is shown to be important. It does not merely repeat verse 10 and is not an addendum that is poorly integrated into the literary unit.

Its importance is that it presents David's inner world: he ascribes his success to the Lord, Who acts for the benefit of His people. This alludes to two aspects of the monarchical covenant in Israel: king-the Lord and king-people. In both realms David is perceived as embodying the book's criteria for the ideal leader.

In addition, the language of the verse is examined against the background of the entire book of Samuel. The verse suggests that David is Saul's successor (whereas verse 10 suggests that he is Samuel's heir).     

ROMAN HISTORY,THEN AND NOW

The argument here is that despite the many similarities of writing the history of ancient Rome, whether the Republic or the Empire, there are stark and significant differences between Edward Gibbon and Mary Beard. In part this is a matter of style and literary genius. It is also evidence of a vast cultural difference, reflected in changing attitudes about writing history and its importance. Beard is impatient with Gibbon's oratorical formality and conceits. Her own writing is easy and unmannered. These literary habits are determined by audience as well as personality. Gibbon addresses the English ruling class and enlightened opinion. His concerns are politics, religion, and law—the interests of his readers who governed and shaped opinion. Beard is more interested in the private and personal, subjects that until recently had only a marginal place in historical writing. She relies heavily on sources that were unknown to Gibbon, and might not have interested him anyhow. Her style mirrors these concerns. She does not assume her readers have had a Classical education nor that they know the general outlines of Roman history. She has little or no tolerance for Gibbon's obsession with religion, and, at least in SPQR, slight interest in either paganism or the rise of Christianity. Her thousand‐year slice of history—Gibbon also tackled a millennium—stops well short of Gibbon's broad philosophical vision of Rome as the cradle of Europe. These contrasts in style, taste, sources, and personality are not offered in judgment, but as commentary on the continuing vitality of Roman history.     

Radical Political Theology

Abstract

This essay investigates the claim, advanced by a number of contributors to Theology and the Political, that the potential for political transformation requires an analogical ontology. I argue that this is not the case, and that an ontology of immanence, as found primarily in the work of Gilles Deleuze, provides an alternative and superior paradigm for political transformation. This argument is advanced by examining the manner in which immanence enables a novel approach to creation. Such immanent creation is distinct in that it departs from analogy's dependence on the transcendent as well as from capitalism's dependence on communication.     

Ethnoscaping Canada's boreal forest: liberal whiteness and its disaffiliation from colonial space

This essay examines the construction of Canada's boreal forest from the point of view of critical whiteness studies. Through an evaluation of two texts—a film and a book—produced in conjunction with a 2003–2004 environmental campaign, it argues that the boreal forest is constructed as a white ethnoscape and that, as a result, boreal forest conservation comes to be associated with ‘white’ identity, although by no means exclusively so, and certainly not without significant contradictions. The essay deploys Robyn Wiegman's notion of liberal whiteness to argue that liberal white subjectivity is cultivated in these texts by its self‐conscious distancing, or disaffiliation, from colonial spatial practices. It is argued that this distancing is achieved through the active inclusion of First Nations peoples in the texts such that the boreal forest is constructed as a socio‐natural working landscape. Liberal white disaffiliation is explored through three specific tropes: inclusion, inverted racial historicism and economic partnership.     

Papadiamandis and Homer: A Note

Abstract

Meaningful allusion to the classics in Papadiamandis's work is not a matter of the text's being stuffed with overt classical references. In his early novels we find a large number of, as it were, classical one-liners: essentially undigested – or at best opportunistic – allusions. The technique is a less focused form of Roidis's in Pope Joan; perhaps a closer comparison is Kalligas's Thanos Vlekas, which is replete with Homeric allusions and puns, none of them integral to the narrative. Similarly, we find in early Papadiamandis a disorderly collection of allusions: Byron, Milton, Aesop, Sophocles, Juvenal, Homer et al.; and sometimes we see his allusiveness to be a mere tic of style rather than fully purposive. In other words, .it is as true here as elsewhere in Greek literary tradition that we need to sift meaningful from more or less chance allusion.