This essay offers a reading of Hamlet and Shakespearian ‘refusal’ in the light of recent translation theory. The title character of this play is one of a number who withdraw their assent from social participation and consequently disrupt legitimation of the existing, exploitative, social order. Considering at first the possibility of an historicist interpretation which would see the play as ‘translating’ cultural anxieties about Elizabethan religious dissidence into early modern drama, the essay concludes that this essentially communicative move would, in (...) fact, run counter to the principle of intransigence embodied in the play. Arguing that contextual historicism and much recent translation theory share a common problematic of participation and exchange – which is ostensibly liberating but ultimately serves to reproduce the ‘bad’ society – the essay turns to Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ for an alternative logic of translatability-as-refusal which illuminates more faithfully the nature of Hamlet’s negativity and its political effects. (shrink)

Shakespeare’s central position in the canon depends upon the idea that he is, above all, a sharer. ‘Traditional’ humanist and ‘radical’ anti-humanist critics ultimately agree, for very different reasons, in reading the plays as celebrations of unavoidable social participation. In doing so, they fail to register their persistent interest in refusal – the negation of coercive social expectations by an isolated insider. This interest goes beyond the practical considerations of dramatic tension or the need for a comic victim. As the (...) cases of Hamlet, Cordelia, Malvolio, Apemantus, Jaques and others suggest, refusal is an indestructible residue of resistance: authority – which depends on an ideology of ‘joining in’ – is unnerved by the fact that absolute refusal cannot be cajoled, bribed, threatened or educated out of existence. This essay argues that reading for refusal sharply illuminates the situation of humanism in the present day. Whilst it is, in part, a critical return to ‘character’, it discovers the individual at an agonising limit. Shakespeare’s refusers reject what passes for selfhood in a culture of enforced sociability, whilst knowing that existing society offers no alternative ground upon which to flourish, or even to exist, as a human being. (shrink)

No recent television creator, no recent author, has acquired as devoted a cult following as Joss Whedon. However, Whedon’s position as a cult auteur has recently been complicated by the success of The Avengers, which has arguably sealed his reputation as major filmmaker, resulting in tensions as to whether conceptions of the “Whedonesque” can exist outside of their cult origins. By means of negotiating these issues, the proposed paper positions Whedon in terms of the “Minor Writer”, a concept developed by (...) poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In these terms, “Minor” is not simply defined as a literature written from the perspective of an oppressed group, nor is it secondary or neglected writing. Instead, Minor writing takes the language of the dominant culture and warps it to new purposes, thus creating “lines of flight” in terms of creative new trajectories that depart from dominant identities, inventing new forms of collective life, consciousness, and affectivity. To this end, Deleuze defines a Minor Literature through three main characteristics; the deterritorialization of language, the political element, and the collective value. In accordance, the paper conceptualizes various elements of Whedon’s oeuvre in these terms; for example, Whedon’s creativity with language in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly, his self-declared Feminist agenda, and the collaborative nature of his work, both in terms of his alliance with other creative partners, and the manner in which he also identifies his audience as “immediate partners and collaborators”. Deleuze maintains that any work of art “points a way through life, finds a way through the cracks”, and how Whedon’s oeuvre engages with this process is ultimately demonstrated, placing him as a writer who exists “in-between” spaces, hence functioning as an exemplification of the Minor Literature concept that informs Deleuzian literary theory. (shrink)

No recent television creator, no recent author, has acquired as devoted a cult following as Joss Whedon. However, Whedon’s position as a cult auteur has recently been complicated by the success of The Avengers, which has arguably sealed his reputation as major filmmaker, resulting in tensions as to whether notions of the “Whedonesque” can still exist outside of their cult origins. By means of negotiating such issues, the proposed paper positions Whedon in terms of the “Minor Writer”, a concept developed (...) by poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In these terms, “Minor” is not simply defined as a literature written from the perspective of an oppressed group, nor is it secondary or neglected writing. Instead, Minor writing takes the language of the dominant culture and warps it to new purposes, thus creating “lines of flight” in terms of creative new trajectories that depart from dominant identities, inventing new forms of collective life, consciousness, and affectivity. To this end, Deleuze defines a Minor Literature through three main characteristics; the deterritorialization of language, the political element, and the collective value. In accordance, the paper conceptualizes various elements of Whedon’s oeuvre in these terms; for example, Whedon’s creativity with language in BTVS and Firefly, his social activism and self-declared Feminist agenda, and the nature of his collaborations, both in terms of his alliance with other creative partners, and the manner in which he sees his audience as “immediate partners and collaborators”. Deleuze maintains that any work of art “points a way through life, finds a way through the cracks”, and how Whedon engages with this process is ultimately demonstrated, placing him as a writer who exists “in-between” spaces, hence functioning as an exemplification of the Minor Literature concept that informs Deleuzian literary theory. (shrink)

This presentation proposes a reading of Katherine Mansfield’s work, including some comparison with that of Virginia Woolf, in relation to medieval theories of anima mundi or world soul, the concept of an animistic universe in which the earth can be revivified through a spiritus mundi. The Pythagoraean-Platonic doctrine of anima mundi was influential in the 12th century Renaissance’s apotheosis of nature found in allegorisations by Bernard de Sylvestris of Tours and Alanus of Insulis, Jean de Meun’s continuation of Guillaume’s The (...) Romance of the Rose, and nature’s personification as ‘vicaire of the almighty Lord’ in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules. This strand of medieval culture and cosmology was often considered as tangential to mainstream European intellectual and Christian religious belief, but it has survived in various literary formations into modernist writing, where it can appear as a vigorous rebuttal of modernization. Anthropomorphic thinking, the view of human subjectivity as rooted in non-human nature, and the animation of the natural world are now associated with ecocriticism and the ethos of environmental guardianship. No direct connection can be traced to the medieval tradition of nature personified in Mansfield’s work, although she often talks of her close identification with other forms of life in her letters and dairies. Woolf makes reference to Shakespeare’s use of the tradition in Mrs Dalloway. Nevertheless Mansfield’s creation of transitive, linking relations between herself and the natural world recalls the ethos of the medieval world view in which there was a close participation between man and the rest of creation. Anthropomorphic attitudes are relevant to the sense of wonder and the marvellous found in her representations of the created world in terms of biological diversity, mystery and splendour. An Arcadian, pastoral orientation appears in her empathy with living creatures, flowers, plants and trees as vital essences with a life of their own; while cultivated gardens and even wild outdoor spaces are settings for epiphanies, and so sites of revelation and transformation. In stories like ‘Botannical Gardens’, ‘The Escape’, ‘Bliss’ and ‘Prelude’, these can be read as modernist versions of the medieval topoi of the grove, the locus amoenus or the pleasance. Referring to the tradition of anima mundi in medieval times I will examine its relevance to Mansfield’s literary practice and modernist aesthetics. I will also make reference to Virginia Woolf’s handling of the same traditions and the part they play in her modernist practice by way of discussing the writers’ views of each other and briefly comparing their work. (shrink)

Apocryphal Theatre: Practising Philosophies is a practice-based research project that consists of examples of my theatre practice and a written thesis. In this thesis, I argue that theatre can be seen to be an act of philosophy, by tessellating Maurice Merleau-Ponty's definition of philosophy as consisting of relearning to look at the world and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's proposition that philosophy is the creation of concepts, and pointing to post-WWII theatre artists whose work both fulfill this definition of philosophy (...) and have informed Apocryphal Theatre's work. Included is an analysis of interviews with three contemporary theatre artists, Richard Foreman, Chris Goode and Ivana Muller, which explore their relationship with philosophical ideas in their work and how that informs their ability to create acts of philosophy. In practice, the research questions that underpin Apocryphal Theatre's research in labs, rehearsals and performance, are philosophical and create the potential for collective acts of philosophy. Apocryphal's practice as research as manifest in its ongoing lab and in the two productions included as part of this thesis, The Jesus Guy and Besides, you lose your soul or The History of Western Civilisation, will be analysed for the historical and philosophical bases of the primary concepts we have created through our research and the tools with which we embody them. The concepts and tools, which are used to address the research questions, are the witness, the grid, cutting up, levels of address and levels of presence. This thesis concludes that theatre and philosophy whilst separate disciplines can overlap in such a way that acts of philosophy can occur in the theatre, and that Apocryphal's theatrical project, which is collaborative, polyvocal and in performance invites the audience to be active witness/participants in the creation of the event, can be viewed as a collective act of philosophy. (shrink)