Poststructuralism

With the recent deaths of both Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, it is an opportune moment to consider their respective contributions to social and cultural theory. The purpose of this article is not to establish an unbridgeable gap which allows no communication between Baudrillard and Derrida's thought. Rather, I will argue that there is an underlying assumption which brings them into close proximity: the idea that the dialectical order of the social, and its relationship to human mortality, has been radically (...) altered by the media-technological systems through which `the real' is represented. Baudrillard's concept of simulation attempts to show how the mass media have become the exclusive condition through which the social is staged, and that there is nothing outside of their operational logics . Derrida's conception of the spectre, on the contrary, presents a `quasi-messianic' figure which haunts the system of simulation; it is s/he who arrives through the intensification of social performativity which Baudrillard understands as completely self-referential. My aim is to show that the most political way of approaching Baudrillard is to read him as a kind of `evil genius' of simulation; as a provocation to acknowledge the spectral bodies who hover between life and death within the system of the hyperreal. (shrink)

Purpose: To show the convergences between Josef Mitterer's non-dualizing way of speaking and actor-network theory. Method: Comparative analysis of Mitterer's non-dualizing philosophy and actor-network philosophy. Findings: Profound convergences between the two accounts may lead to a unified account that could redefine traditional philosophical problems. Benefits: The paper extends the range of Mitterer's non-dualizing philosophy and actor-network theory enabling both to face new problems. Among them, extended non-dualizing philosophy may undergo empirical investigations.

Purpose: Appreciating the relationship between Sylvio Ceccato and Ernst von Glasersfeld, both as people and in their work. Approach: historical and personal accounts, archeological approach to written evidence. Findings: Ceccato’s work is introduced to an English speaking audience, and the roots of Glasersfeld’s work in Ceccato’s is explored. Flaws in Ceccato’s approach are indicated, together with how Glasersfeld’s work overcomes these, specially in language and automatic translation, and what became Radical Constructivism. Conclusion: Glasersfeld willingly acknowledges Ceccato, who he still refers (...) to as the Master. But Ceccato’s work is little known, specially in the English speaking world. The introduction, critique and delineation of extension and resolution of Ceccato’s ideas in Glasersfeld’s work is the intended value of the paper. (shrink)

1. Introduction: Kairopolitics: The Politics of Realtime -- 2. Thought-Time: Immediacy and Live Theory -- 3. Control-Time: Immediacy and Constant Capitalism -- 4. Conclusion: Defense-Time: Immediacy and Realtime Resistance.

I wish to begin by recalling the treatment of mourning, melancholy, and suicide in the last two books of Troilus and Criseyde. The subject of that catastrophe was a chivalric hero whose identity, as I have argued elsewhere, involved a particular discourse of love. This discourse assumed models of gender, individual identity, and community which were intrinsic to ruling elites. It hinged on producing a sense of lack which was to be met by distinctive forms of erotic desire bound up (...) with a complex web of courtly language and behavior. To this process a minutely organized construction of gender roles is essential, a topic whose analysis has been enabled and encouraged by wide-ranging developments in feminist scholarship over the last twenty years. (shrink)

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this essay I will examine the development of the notion of transcendence in Blanchot's early critical writings. Doing so indicates the radical way that Blanchot reconfigures this central ontological and theological term by way of his readings of the literary use of language. In turn this exposes the essential relation between finitude and literature, something which the second part of the essay will examine by way of Heidegger's study of the myth of Er.

The article explores the striking coincidences in Heidegger's and Blanchot's account of the image as death mask. The analysis of the respective theories of the image brings forth two radically divergent conceptions of thinking as "laying patent" (Heidegger) and of thinking as "laying bare" (Blanchot).

The Telos editorial board has not been unaffected by the progressive disintegration of the left over the last few years, a disintegration precipitated by the rapid fading of the Marxist model — whether Western, Marxist-Leninist, or other — and the inability to substitute a new one to confront the rise of neo-conservatism. Various factions, consequently, have developed that can roughly be identified as Habermasian, post-Adornian (the artificial negativity wing), proto-Freudian, or even post-structuralist. At the same time, the journal's turn toward (...) more political themes has also generated heated internal debate over the German peace movement, feminism, the nature of the Soviet Union, etc. (shrink)

Postmodernism today is driven by a set of theoretical stances that grow increasingly problematic. But as the theoretical contradictions emerge, it becomes possible to contrast this theoretical discourse to the ambitions that initially led writers and artists to pursue their version of postmodern perspectives. So this book explores what remains viable and valuable in some representative versions of what these writers and artists created. Altieri begins with an essay defining five basic contradictions in postmodern theory and outlining specific artistic strategies (...) for dwelling with and within those contradictions. Part Two then sets the historical stage with two essays—one focusing on the efforts to overthrow late modernism by Jasper Johns and John Ashbery, the other tracing the emergence of a logic of contingency in the poetics of Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara, and Sylvia Plath. With Part Three the focus shifts to essays proposing different value frameworks for postmodern poets, frameworks that range from moral philosophy to the resources of the tradition of love poetry. Part Four turns to visual artists first engaging the efforts to politicize the postmodern in the 1980s, then showing how Frank Stella's work can be put in dialogue with that of Jacques Derrida. Finally, the book swallows its own tail by proposing an argument that the only version of the sublime that today does not collapse into self-congratulation is the sublime of self-disgust. _Postmodernism Now_ holds out the possibility that the arts have been America’s richest negotiations of postmodernity, and it insists that criticism need not displace art into social allegories in order to develop their relevance to social life. (shrink)

If Milton is the grand expositor of human culture as a middle realm, Williams can be seen as in many respects his secular heir, an heir careful to work out how the poetic imagination serves to make man's expulsion from Edenic origins bearable and even invigorating. Williams' poetics begins, as Riddel makes clear, in the awareness that there is no inherent or even recoverable correspondence between words and facts in the world, but Williams then devotes most of his energies to (...) denying the metaphysical alternative to that position—the claim that all language can do is reflect on and play with the emptiness or fictiveness of its signifiers. If words do not copy but produce meanings, then they can be used significantly to focus our attention on the activities of the artist and his constructed characters as they engage in that process of production. The act of producing meanings can be the process by which to achieve another kind of reference, for the act of expression can itself become the focus generating a poem's significance by calling attention to the various ways authors and characters station themselves in relation to specific situations. Fiction then is not so much a term describing the ontological status of certain kinds of language but a term characterizing a particular way of using language to reflect upon forms of behavior in which we are not fully conscious of the quality of our activities. Williams' position on the artist's language is clearest in his frequent metaphor of the artist as farmer. The initial activity of both men is a kind of violence, an assertion of the difference between human desires and indifferent "blank fields." But what begins as antagonism does not result in the creation of self-referential fictive structures or the gay wisdom of maintaining and disseminating differences. Rather antagonism is the precondition for what Williams richly labels "composition": the farmer-poet organizes the blank field into a fertile, life-sustaining set of relationships which are not simply linguistic.1 · 1. Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott , pp. 98-99. Williams' image of arts as antagonistic composing has important parallels with the Russian Formalist concept of "defamiliarization," but for Williams it is not simply a scene but a total human act that is revealed by this process. Charles Altieri teaches modern literature and literary theory in the English department at the University of Washington. The author of Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry of the 1960s, he has just completed a study of literary meaning. "Culture and Skepticism: A Response to Michael Fischer" was contributed to Critical Inquiry in the Winter 1979 issue. (shrink)

The present article aims at postulating cannibalism as a fundamental axis for the analysis of the processes of subjectivation of Spanish America since the 15th century. The hypothesis is that this process has gone through three stages, which allow for the delimitation of the differences of what I shall refer to, for now, as regimes of cannibalism understood as subjectivation processes:(i) Anthropophagic or of ritual war.(ii) Mimetic or of colonial incorporation(iii) Iconic or of mediatic absorption, at a global level.In order (...) to construct the regimes of cannibalism as a concept I have chosen to use two perspectives: the one which speaks of the ritual experimentation of anthropophagy from the inside and the one which moves through the variants of that double desire for the other’s desire that makes every process of colonization possible; in the known forms of territorial annexation, incorporation (productive, spiritual, institutional) and absorption by the global system of mediatization. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 517-523, July 2012.