Voice, in Jacques Dupin’s poetry, is singularly captured in the state of sufferance. It emerges b... more Voice, in Jacques Dupin’s poetry, is singularly captured in the state of sufferance. It emerges by way of the operations of separation, division and destruction of the poetic subject within the ‘cruel geography’ of Dupin’s universe. Focusing specifically on the poem ‘La Double jarre’, in Contumace, the article surveys different kinds of poetic constructions of vocal dilapidation, particularly via the contrasting operations of imaginary doubling and inscriptive violence. In so doing, it will account for Dupin’s use of distinctive typographical patterns. The key theoretical reference is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s notion of ‘typography’ as a critique of discourse that foregrounds the process of vocal estrangement or ‘enunciative depropriation’. By conducting the analysis within the triple thematic perspective of death, origins and writing, the article claims to further advance recent and current work on the nature and limits of representation.
The language of otherness is a discursive framework that applies to modern poetry in the way it r... more The language of otherness is a discursive framework that applies to modern poetry in the way it responds to the disappearance of stable forms of legitimization. This study focuses on the writings of three poets, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Ponge, all of whom have approached in a vexed manner the task of poetic innovation because they were all preoccupied to some degree by the question of authentication. It analyses selected writings of the poets by highlighting the affective polarities that emerge in their works, particularly through the intellectual trials to which they subject themselves, but also in their assessment of their place in a literary tradition that, as modern poets, they seek to overturn. The analysis is based on Lacan’s notion of the big Other as the site of authorization but also of the misestimation of desire inasmuch as it conveyed in language.
Beginnings can be empirically described, philosophically debated, fictionally recounted or theatr... more Beginnings can be empirically described, philosophically debated, fictionally recounted or theatrically staged – each kind of discourse approaches beginnings via an examination of representation as an impossible return to source. The work of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe articulates the problem of beginnings by considering them as a form of subjective collapse, loss of integrity and aggravation of emotion resulting from the paradoxical logic of representation. While Lacoue-Labarthe’s position has been largely developed in his philosophical writings, this study focuses more specifically on his literary production, namely his collection of short stories, L’ “Allégorie”, and his staged debate with Jean-Luc Nancy in Scène: suivi de Dialogue sur le dialogue, in which the two writers present opposing views on the theatre. The analysis of the above texts centres on the two key “locations” for beginnings, namely narrative voice and the theatrical stage.
La lecture est le processus par lequel l'oeuvre litteraire, qui est de l'ordre de la fict... more La lecture est le processus par lequel l'oeuvre litteraire, qui est de l'ordre de la fiction, est confrontee a la realite dans laquelle vit le lecteur. L'objectif de l'etude de la lecture est donc de rendre compte de la facon dont le "monde" du texte rencontre le "monde" du lecteur. A cette fin, deux types de reflexion sont envisages. Le premier consiste dans l'analyse rhetorique du discours litteraire, ou il est question de decrire les procedes par lesquels le narrateur essaie d'interpeller, de solliciter ou d'emouvoir son lecteur. La force d'attraction qu'exerce le discours litteraire sur le lecteur s'explique par sa capacite de revetir l'apparence de la verite. La seconde etape, celle de l'hermeneutique, porte sur les possibilites d'interpretation qui s'offrent au lecteur vis-a-vis de l'oeuvre. L'hermeneutique vise, au-dela de la recherche du sens, a mettre a jour les modes de pensee qui affectent...
If Duras' writing has always addressed key existential questions, it has also shown a noticea... more If Duras' writing has always addressed key existential questions, it has also shown a noticeable trend over the decades away from its earlier preoccupation with social mores and towards the exploration of metaphysical questions, central among which is the question of death. Earlier heroines such as Anne Desbaresdes and Loi V. Stein (1) appeared largely as figures of silent revolt who shunned the dictates of a staid bourgeois society, and at great risk to themselves chose to forge their own path towards self-fulfilment. They thus tended to attract readings that focused on the process of sexual and social emancipation. Later heroines, however, such as those that figure in Duras' works in the 1980's, distinguish themselves by the fact that they invariably place themselves in untenable moral and political positions. Among these one could cite their willing participation in the reign of sexual violence, underage sexuality, emotional cruelty and wilful self-destruction. It may be that the morality informing these works is questionable. However, the real challenge posed by such works lies in the search for a suitable analytical framework that would help account for the metaphysical turn that inspires Duras' writing during this period. It is in order to meet this challenge that the present study introduces the notion of scandal. Scandal in Duras can be best approached by considering the writer's decision to publish La Douleur while her ex-husband was still alive. Her biographer Laure Adler sums it up aptly: "Depuis longtemps Duras viole les regles de la bienseance. Avec la publication de La Douleur en avril 1985, elle prend le risque de violer celles de l'amour et de l'amiti,." (2) Duras, in other words, now seems to want to attack the universally recognised human virtues, such as love and friendship, that hold society together. It would have been socially responsible and humanly sensitive, one might suggest, to leave the manuscript of La Douleur, in which she portrays her ex-husband Robert Antelme's agony on his return from the front, in the blue wardrobe of her house in Neauphle-le-Chateau for several more years, but she not only rushed the publication but personally sent a copy to her ex-husband's wife. This is not to deny that there are convincing arguments in favour of its publication, for instance, that it is important to her personally as a means of coming to terms with her past, or that it is important for the French people generally to re-examine the heady days of liberation. However, the decision to publish the work when she did, and without the permission of the person she portrays, can be construed as an act that defies social propriety and human sensitivities; equally, it shows her to be impervious to any feelings of shame that may be associated with her own role in the action of the novel.J Far from being anecdotal, then, the events surrounding the publication of La Douleur suggest that scandal is endemic to Duras' work; indeed, it will be the point of this study to show that scandal is a force that informs several of the works she produced during the decade of the 1980's. Linguistically and conceptually, the term scandal can be traced to the ancient Greek skandalon, meaning "snare for an enemy, cause of moral stumbling." (4) Christian thought has made much of this concept, as key passages from Saint Thomas Aquinas explicitly demonstrate, (5) but the seeds of Aquinas' formulation are already present in much of Plato, particularly in his psychology where he deals with the unruly part of the soul, also named the passions. Drawing a line between the Christian and Platonic philosophies, one can define scandal as the physical trigger that hurls individuals into a spiral of suffering. It is the material cause of a person's moral ruin, whether it be embodied in an individual agent such as the devil, or in a singular representation such as a word or an image that in its appeal captivates people and drawing them into its illusion, leads them to their downfall. …
International Journal of Francophone Studies, 2019
Michel Leiris's treatment of clothing in L'Afrique fantôme, his diary account of his jour... more Michel Leiris's treatment of clothing in L'Afrique fantôme, his diary account of his journey through Africa as part of an ethnographic expedition, demonstrates how dress habits constitute a value-laden system. Clothing belongs to a category of objects, which includes talismans and masks, that Leiris calls 'choses d'apparat' because of their tendency to acquire a ceremonial significance. As such, they mark indelibly the travellers' first impressions of the men and women they encounter. Leiris's substantial body of autobiographical writing shows that his interest in clothing is not limited to his travels but goes back to his most distant childhood memories, in which items of dress acquire a distinct theatrical significance. The present study examines the descriptions of dress in L'Afrique fantôme in terms of what they reveal about the respective attitudes of the European travellers and local populations they meet. It explains also how dress habits funct...
Christian Prigent views his writing as an effort to expose the 'parler faux' of ambient d... more Christian Prigent views his writing as an effort to expose the 'parler faux' of ambient discourses and condemn the impoverishment of language and ideas by the media industry, in particular. Prigent's later texts work on the principle that the acceleration, intensification and gratification that characterize an image-driven society result in the disempowerment of its citizens. Prigent responds with a critical poetics that this study endeavours to describe with reference to two texts: Le Monde est marrant (2008) and La Vie moderne (2012). These texts devise techniques of vocal imitation (which, adopting Gérard Genette's neologism, we call mimological) as a means of addressing those techniques by which the media industry creates credulous and consumption-ready subjects. This critical poetics constitutes a system, it is argued, because it deploys a limited set of combinations as a way of figuring an aberration of an existing system. Prigent's mimetic system demonstra...
When friends engage with each other's work, they are exposed to the doubling that has infecte... more When friends engage with each other's work, they are exposed to the doubling that has infected philosophical discourse since its beginnings, imbuing it with a chronic instability. Such is Lacoue-Labarthe's vision of philosophy's tendency to madness, epitomised by the way in which the doubling occurring in Nietzsche (Zarathustra) doubles that of Plato (Socrates). By examining the ways in which the problem of doubling, or dangerous identifications, is formulated, avoided or confronted in the mutual readings of Lacoue-Labarthe (“In the Name of”) and Derrida (“Desistance”), it will be possible to shed some light on the anxiety of influence that underlies late twentieth-century philosophy.
... In his Mimologiques, Gérard Genette examines the theory that language derives from features o... more ... In his Mimologiques, Gérard Genette examines the theory that language derives from features of the natural world, often referred to as Cratylism. Citing common examples such as nicknames and onomatopoeia, Genette argues ...
In his posthumous Écrits sur l’art, French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe considers his num... more In his posthumous Écrits sur l’art, French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe considers his numerous experiences with artists and their works as different ways of putting himself to the ‘test of art’. This consists in pitting the main tenets of his philosophical works (Typographies, vol. I: Le Sujet de la philosophie, and Typographies, vol. II: L’Imitation des modernes) against his lived encounters with works and artists, while taking account of the particular complex of problems that confront art in the twentieth century following its two crises of authority, that of God and of Man. The central question that drives his Écrits sur l’art is ‘How can art identify itself?’ Lacoue-Labarthe asks us to take particular note of its reflexive formulation: when art becomes a self-constituting force, how can it be anything other than a form of survival? To support his position, Lacoue-Labarthe revisits several concepts he developed in his philosophical works: art as the site of a retreat, the hyperbological nature of art, the disaster of the subject and the concept of the figure.
“Not ‘trilogy,’ I beseech you” was Samuel Beckett response when the idea of giving his three post... more “Not ‘trilogy,’ I beseech you” was Samuel Beckett response when the idea of giving his three post-war novels the title of trilogy was first floated by his editor John Calder (Ackerley and Gontarski, 586). Editorial pressure prevailed, however, and the word trilogy was subsequently accepted by the public, scholars and, albeit grudgingly, by Beckett himself. The publication of Beckett’s late-career narratives, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho gave rise to a similar controversy. When John Calder first published the three prose texts in Britain under the single title Nohow On, John Banville from the Irish Times objected that creating in this way a de facto trilogy goes against the spirit in which the texts were produced. Again, the publishers persisted in their designs, leading once more to a general consensus regarding the term “second trilogy,” sometimes appearing as “micro-trilogy.” As insignificant as it appears, the tale of the two trilogies mimics one of the central dilemmas of Beckett’s works, namely the chronic difficulty of identifying a thing with its name. It points, in other words, to the fact of “ill-saying” that gives Beckett’s prose its aesthetic principle while at the same time presenting it with its greatest creative challenge. It is perhaps to the “ill-named” trilogies that Beckett unsuspectingly refers when he writes, in Ill Seen Ill Said: “The mind betrays the treacherous eyes and the treacherous word their treacheries. Haze sole certitude” (78). 1 This paper will follow the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s assertion that Beckett’s “ill-saying” is an ontological problem rather than one that pertains simply to representational technique. In his Beckett: L’increvable desir, translated by Nina Power and Albert Toscano as Tireless Desire, Badiou confesses to having in his youth misread Beckett as an account of man living in despair in a universe without God, and without meaning or love. Spurning the “young cretin” that enthusiastically embraced such a stereotypical humanist and existentialist reading of Beckett, Badiou now returns to Beckett’s work with the intention of sketching its peculiar “methodological ascesis.” For this, he says, is the key to understanding how the Irish writer addresses the eminent philosophical question: “what
Voice, in Jacques Dupin’s poetry, is singularly captured in the state of sufferance. It emerges b... more Voice, in Jacques Dupin’s poetry, is singularly captured in the state of sufferance. It emerges by way of the operations of separation, division and destruction of the poetic subject within the ‘cruel geography’ of Dupin’s universe. Focusing specifically on the poem ‘La Double jarre’, in Contumace, the article surveys different kinds of poetic constructions of vocal dilapidation, particularly via the contrasting operations of imaginary doubling and inscriptive violence. In so doing, it will account for Dupin’s use of distinctive typographical patterns. The key theoretical reference is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s notion of ‘typography’ as a critique of discourse that foregrounds the process of vocal estrangement or ‘enunciative depropriation’. By conducting the analysis within the triple thematic perspective of death, origins and writing, the article claims to further advance recent and current work on the nature and limits of representation.
The language of otherness is a discursive framework that applies to modern poetry in the way it r... more The language of otherness is a discursive framework that applies to modern poetry in the way it responds to the disappearance of stable forms of legitimization. This study focuses on the writings of three poets, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Ponge, all of whom have approached in a vexed manner the task of poetic innovation because they were all preoccupied to some degree by the question of authentication. It analyses selected writings of the poets by highlighting the affective polarities that emerge in their works, particularly through the intellectual trials to which they subject themselves, but also in their assessment of their place in a literary tradition that, as modern poets, they seek to overturn. The analysis is based on Lacan’s notion of the big Other as the site of authorization but also of the misestimation of desire inasmuch as it conveyed in language.
Beginnings can be empirically described, philosophically debated, fictionally recounted or theatr... more Beginnings can be empirically described, philosophically debated, fictionally recounted or theatrically staged – each kind of discourse approaches beginnings via an examination of representation as an impossible return to source. The work of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe articulates the problem of beginnings by considering them as a form of subjective collapse, loss of integrity and aggravation of emotion resulting from the paradoxical logic of representation. While Lacoue-Labarthe’s position has been largely developed in his philosophical writings, this study focuses more specifically on his literary production, namely his collection of short stories, L’ “Allégorie”, and his staged debate with Jean-Luc Nancy in Scène: suivi de Dialogue sur le dialogue, in which the two writers present opposing views on the theatre. The analysis of the above texts centres on the two key “locations” for beginnings, namely narrative voice and the theatrical stage.
La lecture est le processus par lequel l'oeuvre litteraire, qui est de l'ordre de la fict... more La lecture est le processus par lequel l'oeuvre litteraire, qui est de l'ordre de la fiction, est confrontee a la realite dans laquelle vit le lecteur. L'objectif de l'etude de la lecture est donc de rendre compte de la facon dont le "monde" du texte rencontre le "monde" du lecteur. A cette fin, deux types de reflexion sont envisages. Le premier consiste dans l'analyse rhetorique du discours litteraire, ou il est question de decrire les procedes par lesquels le narrateur essaie d'interpeller, de solliciter ou d'emouvoir son lecteur. La force d'attraction qu'exerce le discours litteraire sur le lecteur s'explique par sa capacite de revetir l'apparence de la verite. La seconde etape, celle de l'hermeneutique, porte sur les possibilites d'interpretation qui s'offrent au lecteur vis-a-vis de l'oeuvre. L'hermeneutique vise, au-dela de la recherche du sens, a mettre a jour les modes de pensee qui affectent...
If Duras' writing has always addressed key existential questions, it has also shown a noticea... more If Duras' writing has always addressed key existential questions, it has also shown a noticeable trend over the decades away from its earlier preoccupation with social mores and towards the exploration of metaphysical questions, central among which is the question of death. Earlier heroines such as Anne Desbaresdes and Loi V. Stein (1) appeared largely as figures of silent revolt who shunned the dictates of a staid bourgeois society, and at great risk to themselves chose to forge their own path towards self-fulfilment. They thus tended to attract readings that focused on the process of sexual and social emancipation. Later heroines, however, such as those that figure in Duras' works in the 1980's, distinguish themselves by the fact that they invariably place themselves in untenable moral and political positions. Among these one could cite their willing participation in the reign of sexual violence, underage sexuality, emotional cruelty and wilful self-destruction. It may be that the morality informing these works is questionable. However, the real challenge posed by such works lies in the search for a suitable analytical framework that would help account for the metaphysical turn that inspires Duras' writing during this period. It is in order to meet this challenge that the present study introduces the notion of scandal. Scandal in Duras can be best approached by considering the writer's decision to publish La Douleur while her ex-husband was still alive. Her biographer Laure Adler sums it up aptly: "Depuis longtemps Duras viole les regles de la bienseance. Avec la publication de La Douleur en avril 1985, elle prend le risque de violer celles de l'amour et de l'amiti,." (2) Duras, in other words, now seems to want to attack the universally recognised human virtues, such as love and friendship, that hold society together. It would have been socially responsible and humanly sensitive, one might suggest, to leave the manuscript of La Douleur, in which she portrays her ex-husband Robert Antelme's agony on his return from the front, in the blue wardrobe of her house in Neauphle-le-Chateau for several more years, but she not only rushed the publication but personally sent a copy to her ex-husband's wife. This is not to deny that there are convincing arguments in favour of its publication, for instance, that it is important to her personally as a means of coming to terms with her past, or that it is important for the French people generally to re-examine the heady days of liberation. However, the decision to publish the work when she did, and without the permission of the person she portrays, can be construed as an act that defies social propriety and human sensitivities; equally, it shows her to be impervious to any feelings of shame that may be associated with her own role in the action of the novel.J Far from being anecdotal, then, the events surrounding the publication of La Douleur suggest that scandal is endemic to Duras' work; indeed, it will be the point of this study to show that scandal is a force that informs several of the works she produced during the decade of the 1980's. Linguistically and conceptually, the term scandal can be traced to the ancient Greek skandalon, meaning "snare for an enemy, cause of moral stumbling." (4) Christian thought has made much of this concept, as key passages from Saint Thomas Aquinas explicitly demonstrate, (5) but the seeds of Aquinas' formulation are already present in much of Plato, particularly in his psychology where he deals with the unruly part of the soul, also named the passions. Drawing a line between the Christian and Platonic philosophies, one can define scandal as the physical trigger that hurls individuals into a spiral of suffering. It is the material cause of a person's moral ruin, whether it be embodied in an individual agent such as the devil, or in a singular representation such as a word or an image that in its appeal captivates people and drawing them into its illusion, leads them to their downfall. …
International Journal of Francophone Studies, 2019
Michel Leiris's treatment of clothing in L'Afrique fantôme, his diary account of his jour... more Michel Leiris's treatment of clothing in L'Afrique fantôme, his diary account of his journey through Africa as part of an ethnographic expedition, demonstrates how dress habits constitute a value-laden system. Clothing belongs to a category of objects, which includes talismans and masks, that Leiris calls 'choses d'apparat' because of their tendency to acquire a ceremonial significance. As such, they mark indelibly the travellers' first impressions of the men and women they encounter. Leiris's substantial body of autobiographical writing shows that his interest in clothing is not limited to his travels but goes back to his most distant childhood memories, in which items of dress acquire a distinct theatrical significance. The present study examines the descriptions of dress in L'Afrique fantôme in terms of what they reveal about the respective attitudes of the European travellers and local populations they meet. It explains also how dress habits funct...
Christian Prigent views his writing as an effort to expose the 'parler faux' of ambient d... more Christian Prigent views his writing as an effort to expose the 'parler faux' of ambient discourses and condemn the impoverishment of language and ideas by the media industry, in particular. Prigent's later texts work on the principle that the acceleration, intensification and gratification that characterize an image-driven society result in the disempowerment of its citizens. Prigent responds with a critical poetics that this study endeavours to describe with reference to two texts: Le Monde est marrant (2008) and La Vie moderne (2012). These texts devise techniques of vocal imitation (which, adopting Gérard Genette's neologism, we call mimological) as a means of addressing those techniques by which the media industry creates credulous and consumption-ready subjects. This critical poetics constitutes a system, it is argued, because it deploys a limited set of combinations as a way of figuring an aberration of an existing system. Prigent's mimetic system demonstra...
When friends engage with each other's work, they are exposed to the doubling that has infecte... more When friends engage with each other's work, they are exposed to the doubling that has infected philosophical discourse since its beginnings, imbuing it with a chronic instability. Such is Lacoue-Labarthe's vision of philosophy's tendency to madness, epitomised by the way in which the doubling occurring in Nietzsche (Zarathustra) doubles that of Plato (Socrates). By examining the ways in which the problem of doubling, or dangerous identifications, is formulated, avoided or confronted in the mutual readings of Lacoue-Labarthe (“In the Name of”) and Derrida (“Desistance”), it will be possible to shed some light on the anxiety of influence that underlies late twentieth-century philosophy.
... In his Mimologiques, Gérard Genette examines the theory that language derives from features o... more ... In his Mimologiques, Gérard Genette examines the theory that language derives from features of the natural world, often referred to as Cratylism. Citing common examples such as nicknames and onomatopoeia, Genette argues ...
In his posthumous Écrits sur l’art, French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe considers his num... more In his posthumous Écrits sur l’art, French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe considers his numerous experiences with artists and their works as different ways of putting himself to the ‘test of art’. This consists in pitting the main tenets of his philosophical works (Typographies, vol. I: Le Sujet de la philosophie, and Typographies, vol. II: L’Imitation des modernes) against his lived encounters with works and artists, while taking account of the particular complex of problems that confront art in the twentieth century following its two crises of authority, that of God and of Man. The central question that drives his Écrits sur l’art is ‘How can art identify itself?’ Lacoue-Labarthe asks us to take particular note of its reflexive formulation: when art becomes a self-constituting force, how can it be anything other than a form of survival? To support his position, Lacoue-Labarthe revisits several concepts he developed in his philosophical works: art as the site of a retreat, the hyperbological nature of art, the disaster of the subject and the concept of the figure.
“Not ‘trilogy,’ I beseech you” was Samuel Beckett response when the idea of giving his three post... more “Not ‘trilogy,’ I beseech you” was Samuel Beckett response when the idea of giving his three post-war novels the title of trilogy was first floated by his editor John Calder (Ackerley and Gontarski, 586). Editorial pressure prevailed, however, and the word trilogy was subsequently accepted by the public, scholars and, albeit grudgingly, by Beckett himself. The publication of Beckett’s late-career narratives, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho gave rise to a similar controversy. When John Calder first published the three prose texts in Britain under the single title Nohow On, John Banville from the Irish Times objected that creating in this way a de facto trilogy goes against the spirit in which the texts were produced. Again, the publishers persisted in their designs, leading once more to a general consensus regarding the term “second trilogy,” sometimes appearing as “micro-trilogy.” As insignificant as it appears, the tale of the two trilogies mimics one of the central dilemmas of Beckett’s works, namely the chronic difficulty of identifying a thing with its name. It points, in other words, to the fact of “ill-saying” that gives Beckett’s prose its aesthetic principle while at the same time presenting it with its greatest creative challenge. It is perhaps to the “ill-named” trilogies that Beckett unsuspectingly refers when he writes, in Ill Seen Ill Said: “The mind betrays the treacherous eyes and the treacherous word their treacheries. Haze sole certitude” (78). 1 This paper will follow the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s assertion that Beckett’s “ill-saying” is an ontological problem rather than one that pertains simply to representational technique. In his Beckett: L’increvable desir, translated by Nina Power and Albert Toscano as Tireless Desire, Badiou confesses to having in his youth misread Beckett as an account of man living in despair in a universe without God, and without meaning or love. Spurning the “young cretin” that enthusiastically embraced such a stereotypical humanist and existentialist reading of Beckett, Badiou now returns to Beckett’s work with the intention of sketching its peculiar “methodological ascesis.” For this, he says, is the key to understanding how the Irish writer addresses the eminent philosophical question: “what
Uploads
Papers by Peter Poiana