Ruben Borg

In Fantasies of Self-Mourning Ruben Borg describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism. The book’s central claim is that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the contradictions of its historical moment. Borg develops a posthumanist critique of the concept of organic life based on comparative readings of Pirandello, Woolf, Beckett, and Flann O’Brien, alongside discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, Béla Tarr, Ridley Scott and Mamoru Oshii. The argument draws together a cluster of modernist narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body—or call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesizing desire and sense perception.

In the Physics Aristotle describes time as something that either does not exist or exists barely and in an obscure manner. Ruben Borg argues that an attempt to grapple with this problem informs the narrative structure, imagery and complex rhetorical strategies of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. By examining the relation between time and processes of figuration in Joyce’s fiction, this study engages with the challenges of grasping time as a multiplicity that resists representation and objective measurement. Joyce’s lexical and rhetorical inventions are viewed as an attempt to describe time’s characteristic movement in terms of waste, measureless excess or fading.

This paper reads Marcel L’Herbier’s The Inhuman Woman as an exemplary expression of a posthuman moment in modernism. Drawing on comparisons with the art of Fernand Léger and James Joyce, it highlights several elements of the film’s aesthetic – its heavily stylized compositions, its striking use of set design and costumes to subvert the visual syntax of foreground and background, its eroticization of technology, its disassembly of the human figure – in order to demonstrate the continuity between a high-modernist discourse on machine-life and current issues in posthuman theory. Both modernism and the posthuman respond to an epochal event within modernity, a technological acceleration of reality that reshapes ontological grammars. Both contemplate reality as a middle ground of mechanical and vital processes. And both are committed to a Copernican decentering of the human eye from its place of privilege in received models of phenomenal experience.

This article offers a rhetorical analysis of Deleuze's concept of the past, understood not as a modification of the present but as a pre-predicative, non-subjective articulation of time. Focusing on the discussion of the three passive syntheses of time in Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, it traces the continuity between past, passivity and passion across Deleuze's body of work in an effort not only to remark on the conceptual resonances between them, but, more importantly, to examine the figural and formal choices that codify those resonances, and to some extent over-determine them – in particular, Deleuze's recourse to allegory and tragic form. Though the past is constituted as a primordial component of time, it already exceeds itself in the passivity of that constitutive moment, of that originary gesture by which it is first committed to historical experience. The process is rendered in dramatic terms: Habitus and Mnemosyne (Habit and Memory; Present and Past) are first pitted against each other – respectively, as the origin of time and its ground. They are then overthrown by an unnamed third element ‘which subordinates the other two to itself’ and opens the whole to infinity. The article thematises the significance of the past within this allegorical drama, develops the character, and draws out the temporal structures encoded in Deleuze's figurations.

My paper addresses the non-human turn in Joyce’s work from the perspective of genetic phenomenology. I begin by commenting on Joyce’s characterization of Molly Bloom as a non-human apparition. I unpack the notion of a non-human apparition in light of Joyce’s interest in the idea of the earth as a generative matrix, and I relate this idea to a genetic enquiry into problems of passive synthesis and the givenness of objects to sense perception. I then trace the elaboration of this theme in a cluster of rhetorical figures from the later novels—puns, clichés, and metonymic associations—that play on the senses of matrix, materiality, and the sex of the mother. The second part turns to representations of the earth in Finnegans Wake. Focusing on scenes of interment and becoming one with the landscape, descriptions of tombs as echo chambers, and of geological sites as giant human bodies, I read Joyce’s earth as the crowning expression of his experiments with a radical (pre- and post-human) phenomenology.

This paper reads Joyce’s fiction as an artistic and philosophical apprenticeship in love. From A Portrait of the Artist to Finnegans Wake, love is examined as a key aesthetic and ethical virtue against two related emotions: pity and desire. Whereas in the earlier Joyce ‘pity’ is valued above ‘desire’ as the more philosophically valid emotion, in the later works (after Giacomo Joyce) Joyce’s understanding of the Love-Pity-Desire triad becomes rather more complex. Not only are the emotions seen to be inextricably bound up; but pity is suspected as the most equivocal of the three.
In tracing the evolution of this idea within Joyce’s work Dante must be recognized as an important source. Joyce becomes increasingly aware of the philosophical bankruptcy of the concept of love in modernity. At first blush he suspects Dante’s theory because he finds he is unable to ground the experience of love in a theological framework (a framework that was available to Dante but not to Joyce himself). However, even at his most ironic, he continues to yearn for some sort of theological/philosophical revalidation of the concept. To this end, his writing tests two distinct strategies: rhetorically, it takes on an elegiac tone, mourning (and ultimately acknowledging) the loss of ‘love’ as a theologically valid emotion; allegorically, it seeks to replicate Dante’s apprenticeship within a secular context, placing erotic experience in a series of trials and moral set-pieces. My analysis of these strategies will draw on several Joycean works but will focus mainly on Giacomo Joyce and Finnegans Wake II.4.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/joyce_studies_annual/v2014/2014.borg.html

In Deleuze and Beckett, ed. Stephen Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite (London: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 193-206.

Abstract:
Deleuze refers to Beckett numerous times throughout his career, most notably in the extended analyses of “The Exhausted” and “The Greatest Irish Film,” but also in passing, in Anti-Oedipus and in the book on Kafka. Common to many of these passing references is a tendency to situate Beckett in a tradition of writers whom Deleuze associates with a peculiar operation of the comic and the joyful in literature—a tradition that includes Kafka and Nietzsche. To understand Deleuze’s fascination with Beckett is to recognize the quintessentially comedic character of these writers. It is to see laughter not as an incidental effect, but as a defining aspect of their work.

This paper explores the idea that the laughter Deleuze admires in Beckett takes root in tragic action. My approach, in presenting this argument, will be to focus on Deleuze’s reading of Hamlet, and then to test a Deleuzian theory of tragedy against images from Beckett’s work (especially from Endgame and “First Love”).

Deleuze’s notion of tragic thought is aligned with a well-known Beckettian motif—the experience of time as interminable hesitation, as a purgatorial suspension of judgement. But not all hesitation is tragic (in the same way that not all laughter takes root in tragedy). Beckett’s case is emblematic because it stages a disjuncture between a dramatic action and the temporal horizon within which it unfolds. I will argue that Beckettian laughter breaks out precisely at the moment in which such a disjuncture occurs.

This paper analyzes the rhetoric of futurity at work in a number of texts dealing with the
“posthuman future of humanity.” It follows these texts in an attempt to historicize such
a future in relation to human history. But it also identifies an overwhelming temporal
contradiction at the heart of their discourse: that the posthuman is already with us even
as it remains to come. If so, is posthuman identity to be interpreted as a mere phase in
the history of human subjectivity? Does posthumanity come about in response to ethical
and epistemological challenges inherited from the experience of human subjects? Or is it
rather an altogether new paradigm that renders the very use of words like “subjectivity,”
“history,” and “experience” anachronistic? Drawing on Hegel, Derrida, and especially
Beckett, I argue that an experience of the impossible informs the moment of posthuman
self-reflection; and consequently, that the challenge of theorizing a point of contact
between human and posthuman being (or human and posthuman history) calls for a
new, ad hoc interpretation of the concept of “impossibility.”

Critical interpretations of Joyce’s discourse on the image have, for the best part, fallen into two categories: idealist or psychoanalytic interpretations of the Joycean imaginary on the one hand, and, on the other, materialist readings often informed by techno-scientific concerns. Different as they are, both these critical paradigms regard the image as a space of dialectical mediation: a means, technical or transcendental, by which an object is given to perception (or a narcissistic subject to self-recognition). This article offers a new point of entry to the issue by recasting Joyce’s discourse on the image in a Deleuzian light. In Deleuze, the image is described as an entity existing between the material and the ideal spheres, but in no way functioning as a synthesis of the two. My contention is that through a Deleuzian reading of the discourse on images mobilized in Joyce’s fiction — from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake — it is possible to think of the image not as a medium of representation, but as an originary element of being and reality in its own right.

This essay reads John Banville’s Mefisto as an extended parable on virtuality. After demonstrating the pertinence of the concept of virtuality to numerous themes mobilized in Banville’s text, it provides a brief philosophical history of the virtual from Aristotle to Deleuze. Defined not only as an ontological dimension, but also as an opening onto truth traced by a peculiar movement of thought, the theme of virtuality is shown to inform Banville’s treatment of the inability of mathematical knowledge to comprehend the true nature (and unity) of being.

This essay discusses the portmanteau as a privileged rhetorical figure in Finnegans Wake. It illustrates the manner in which Joyce’s use of the portmanteau enables him to establish a nonmathematical and nondialectical relation between the work’s minimal structural element and the structure as a whole. The essay draws on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “the virtual” and on Jacques Derrida’s notion of “invention” in order to theorize this relation. After reviewing previous discussions of Joyce’s technique of word combination, it proceeds to consider the Wakean portmanteau as a textual event, an utterly new object that irrupts within the fabric of language to suspend conventional protocols of interpretation. Within this theoretical framework, the text’s minimal structural element is charged with a radically inventive potential. The claim of this essay is that such potential pertains to a movement of thought that unfolds in excess of received hermeneutic paradigms.

In the library scene of Ulysses IX Stephen Dedalus presents us with an image of time from which time is virtually absent. "In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be."1 Notably the instant to which Stephen alludes captures the totality of Past-Present-Future, but only does so by subtracting from its focus time itself, which surely must have something to do with passage, with difference, and with change. Here, Past, Present and Future are in fact abstract concepts given over to space, and all that is left of the sense of time in Stephen's words is the fate of the fading coal. The parable of the coal illustrates an essential quality of time reproduced in the Wake's narrative and rhetorical strategies: time is grasped by the imagination as that which always eludes its own image. What we see when we look at this image (in place of time) is a field of objectified moments existing ideally and simultaneously. Held together by sight and preserved by reflection, Past, Present and Future can only be imagined as a cluster of fixed points abstracted from a linear continuum.

... I shall put the man and the woman in the same story, there is so little difference between a man and a woman, between mine I ... Holding two mutually exclusive but somehow co-existent statements of fact, Beckett's backtracking is both aporetic and supremely charged with ...

... The clash between life and history replicates the structure of the apocalyptic chronotope outlined in Gomel's reading of Ballard but transposes that structure onto an experience of ... Beckett famously draws on Dante to characterize this world as “a Limbo purged of desire” (2006: 44 ...

Three Articles of Posthuman Modernism: The Meta-Cinema of Marcel L’Herbier (and Friends)


April 2019

This paper reads Marcel L’Herbier’s The Inhuman Woman as an exemplary expression of a posthuman moment in modernism. Drawing on comparisons with the art of Fernand Léger and James Joyce, it highlights several elements of the film’s aesthetic – its heavily stylized compositions, its striking use of set design and costumes to subvert the visual syntax of foreground and background, its eroticization of technology, its disassembly of the human figure – in order to demonstrate the continuity between a high-modernist discourse on machine-life and current issues in posthuman theory. Both modernism and the posthuman respond to an epochal event within modernity, a technological acceleration of reality that reshapes ontological grammars. Both contemplate reality as a middle ground of mechanical and vital processes. And both are committed to a Copernican decentering of the human eye from its place of privilege in received models of phenomenal experience.

This paper takes its title, and its cue, from a well-known phrase written by Joyce in 1904: “a portrait is not an identificative paper, but rather the curve of an emotion” (Poems and Shorter Writings 11). My aim is to investigate the significance of a pre-modern theory of emotions for Joyce’s poetics. I begin by tracing a discourse on the dramatic passions in Joyce (as developed in his critical writings). I look at early texts such as “Drama and Life” and excerpts from “The Paris Notebook” in order to explore Joyce’s idea of the curve of an emotion as a pre-representational substrate of narrative. I then proceed to discuss Joyce’s treatment of tragic and comic emotions in the fiction (especially Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) in relation to salient motifs drawn from Hamlet. The bulk of the analysis will be a reading of “The Haunted Inkbottle” as a comic transposition of Hamlet’s discourse on tragic passions (especially Hamlet’s reflections on the truth of the passions in Act I). There will be ghosts, disjointed timelines, and, most importantly, a focus on mourning attire.

September 2015, Metamorphoses: The 3rd International Flann O’Brien Conference (Prague, Czech Republic).

This paper reads scenes of transformation in Brian O’Nolan’s work in light of his experimentation with tragic and comic form. I begin by situating O'Nolan's poetics within an Aristotelian and Scholastic discourse on tragedy and comedy. Focusing in particular on “John Duffy’s Brother,” and on segments from Cruiskeen Lawn, I articulate a peculiarly Mylesian response to traditional definitions of genre in order to determine what is comic (or tragic) about the metamorphoses undergone by O’Nolan’s characters.

June 2013. Problems with Authority: The Second International Flann O’Brien Conference (Rome, Italy).


In this paper I advance the idea that at the heart of O’Nolan’s writing is a sustained reflection on the Pauline trope of conversion. I claim that in dealing with this trope O’Nolan may be seen to participate in a conversation with modernist writers on the notion of event.
The chief appeal of Paul’s rhetoric for O’Nolan is the invention of a paradoxical relation to the law, a neither/nor-but-both-at-once logic of self-identification with a legal subject or a legal community. O’Nolan looks to Paul, and in particular, to a Pauline rhetoric of conversion, to characterize his own ambiguous status as an experimental modernist writer, and, simultaneously, a critic of modernist avant-garde pretentions. The paradoxical structure of the conversion trope thus comes to inform O’Nolan’s attitude towards modernism. But it also provides the existential coordinates of a time out of joint, and describes the very texture of the present in which his characters exist.
Focusing on The Dalkey Archive, “Two in One,” and the “Sir Myles” fragments from Cruiskeen Lawn I highlight a peculiar Mylesian conceit: O’Nolan’s narratives unfold in a grotesque double of the present—a present shot through with the after-effects of one’s own death. This narrative situation underwrites a “neither/nor-but-both-at-once” gesture of resistance to the law: in Paul’s case a refusal of both the Imperial order of Rome and the authority of the Mosaic covenant (but in that refusal is also an appropriation of the concepts of citizenship and election for the purpose of a new relation to history); in Flann, a diagnosis of modernity as a time of joint. 
I then consider briefly the notion of a Pauline apocalypse in relation to the narrative organization of The Third Policeman and “John Duffy’s Brother.” Both narratives give us to think the power of a secret event—to transform reality not by degrees, but abruptly and as a whole. In one case, the event is kept secret from the protagonist (and from the reader). In the other, the secret is kept by the protagonist from the world.

June 2012. Joyce, Dublin and Environs: the 23rd International James Joyce Symposium (Dublin, Ireland).

An extended version of this paper appears in Joyce Studies Annual.
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/joyce_studies_annual/v2014/2014.borg.html

Aug. 2009. Connect Deleuze: Second International Deleuze Studies Conference (Cologne, Germany).
--- An extended version of this talk was published in JML under the title Mirrored Disjunctions: On a Deleuzo-Joycean Theory of the Image
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jml/summary/v033/33.2.borg.html

Partial Answers is an international, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal that focuses on the study of literature and the history of ideas. Partial Answers strives to explore ways in which literary texts can be perceived both as works of art and as testing grounds for ideas. The editors believe literary works participate in the history of ideas, whether understood as a continuous line of development, as a process of inheriting and correcting schemas, or as a sequence of archeological layers. Partial Answers publishes articles on various national literatures including Anglophone, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Russian, and predominately English literature.