Books by Adam R Rosenthal
Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life, 2024
Preface and Introduction
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Poetics and the Gift, 2022
A close reading of Emerson's 1844 essay, "Gifts," with a focus on what he calls the "flower of co... more A close reading of Emerson's 1844 essay, "Gifts," with a focus on what he calls the "flower of commodities."
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Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida, 2022
A reading of the important of poetry and the gift in Derrida's writings, from Economimesis to Giv... more A reading of the important of poetry and the gift in Derrida's writings, from Economimesis to Given Time and beyond.
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Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida, 2022
Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poeti... more Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poetic discourse and does so from the age of Homer up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics. Beginning from a. new interpretation of Derrida's writings on the gift, Rosenthal argues that this ambivalent figure names at one and the same time poetry's most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. In this way, the gift conducts material relays of patronage and theories of poetic origination in genius, inspiration and imagination. Poetics and the Gift capitalizes on this double function in order to read material historical accounts of poetry alongside philosophical and poetic ones.
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Papers by Adam R Rosenthal
Research in Phenomenology, 2022
This essay explores the importance of Donner le temps II within the context of Derrida’s writings... more This essay explores the importance of Donner le temps II within the context of Derrida’s writings on Heidegger and the gift. In the first section of the essay, I situate the publication of the latter half of Derrida’s 1978–79 seminar against his writings on the gift generally, beginning in 1968 and ending in 2000. In the second section, I explain how the second volume of Donner le temps relates to the first. In the final three sections of the paper, I focus on three prominent topics of the seminar, so as to show how they impact our previous understanding of major aspects of Derrida’s thought: first, the Heideggerian thinking of the es gibt, as it relates to the gift’s unconditionality. Second, the problematic of the Kunstwerk, as it informs Derrida’s thinking of récit. Third, the problem of Dichtung, as it is linked to the poématique.
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SubStance, 2019
Abstract:In "Clon'd" I ask in what way the problem of the "clone," as it ... more Abstract:In "Clon'd" I ask in what way the problem of the "clone," as it confronts us today, can be separated from modern and ancient questions concerning naming. Beginning with a philological analysis of the word "clone," I then turn to the conceptual parallels between vegetative reproduction and linguistic reproduction. Through a comparison between the clone and the double, I argue, by way of conclusion, that the fear of the clone corresponds to a relatively new notion of genetic identity, which has repercussions far beyond the bio-technological realm.
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Oxford Literary Review, 2019
This essay examines Derrida's discussion, alongside Elisabeth Roudinesco, of the stability of... more This essay examines Derrida's discussion, alongside Elisabeth Roudinesco, of the stability of the family unit in For What Tomorrow… By following Derrida's serial revisions of Roudinesco's claim tha...
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Poetics Today, 2021
In this article the author explores how the problem of the seminar enters into the work of Jacque... more In this article the author explores how the problem of the seminar enters into the work of Jacques Derrida. He shows how it emerges not only within the context of the teaching institution but also as a conceptual thematic with a history far in excess of the educational institutions of France. As early as 1968 and as late as 2003, the word, concept, figure, and institution of “the seminar” was one that Derrida worked to define and problematize. The author thus asks how Derrida’s autobiographical relationship with the institution of the seminar both influenced and was influenced by what one might call the philosophical problem of the seminar. As Derrida points out on a number of occasions, the seminar is not a neutral space. Indeed, it is a particularly ambivalent one, as early discussions of it in “Plato’s Pharmacy” and Clang show. In appropriating the form, not only for his teaching but also as a problematic of the seminars that he gave, the author argues that Derrida precisely embr...
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Poetics Today, 2021
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Studies in Romanticism, 2016
The wrecks and fragments of those subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obs... more The wrecks and fragments of those subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole. Their very language ... --A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancients, Relative to the Subject of Love (1) I. Given Names THE TITLE OF SHELLEY'S "HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY," as has often been pointed out, situates the poem within a tradition that it will attempt to displace. Naming itself a hymn, Shelley's poem invokes a Christian concept of divinity that it ironizes and thereby calls into question. As Earl Wasserman, Spencer Hall, and Richard Cronin have shown, the "Hymn" incorporates Christian thematics throughout, only to disfigure them by way of a series of reinscriptions of canonical doctrine. (2) Not only does the poem's speaker decry the "name of God," but in championing the secularized virtues of "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem" (37), he also refers by negation to the love of God, hope of salvation, and faith in a transcendent divinity. (3) Of course, the hymnic genre predates the Christian tradition's appropriation of it, and there are also many questions that remain unanswered concerning the Greek influences in the poem: formally, that of the Greek hymnic tradition, and conceptually, that of a Platonic metaphysics. (4) This latter, much derided hypothesis has received no shortage of criticism over the last sixty years, and mostly with due cause. (5) Motivated largely by the Platonic resonances of Shelley's title and his avowed interest in Plato's thought, this position has been condemned not only for its oversimplification of Shelley's stance and tendency to reduce it to mere Platonism, but also for its neglect of Shelley's "intellectual philosophy" and the sophistication of his reading of Plato, which would much better be expressed as reflective than merely mimetic. One need not look very hard to see extra-Platonic elements infiltrate the "Hymn," most notably those empirical or utilitarian items such as the "world" that, as Pollin has pointed out, are to be consecrated alongside the transcendent ones. (6) If, nevertheless, the question of Plato's influence has remained persistent for readers of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," it is ultimately less by virtue of any Platonism in the poem than by the title's inscription of a more or less Platonic phrase--a phrase that Shelley himself would use to translate Plato. Yet critics of the "Hymn" seem destined to remain conflicted even on this point, for it was not until nearly two years after Shelley's composition of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" on the shores of Lake Geneva that he would translate that fateful line: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as, "but [he] would turn towards the wide ocean of intellectual beauty," in his rendering of Plato's Symposium (Shelley 449). (7) The translation would then be a transcription from his "Hymn" to Plato's Symposium, and this in the most literal sense of the word. For it would here be a matter of writing across texts, from one context to another, from one body, title, or text to another, but also from one language to another. We could call this a trans-crib-lation, for it departs at the same time from Plato's textual source and his own "Hymn," which ought to be, but is not, foreign to it. "Intellectual Beauty" (as a phrase) is then both more and less Platonic. For, as is evinced by the chronology of the poem's composition, it is born out of Shelley's own work, only to converge with Plato at a later date. That the phrase "Intellectual Beauty," moreover, only appears in the "Hymn's" title, as though it were a leftover or supernumerary of the text, further exacerbates this already tenuous relation between the poem and the Platonic tradition. Yet for all of these difficulties, Shelley's title nevertheless suffices to articulate a bond that no amount of disapproval, dissuasion, or disavowal would be capable of fully denying, and not only because of the possibility that Shelley had read Plato's Symposium prior to composing the "Hymn," nor, conversely, simply because he may have translated the Symposium with his "Hymn" in mind. …
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Política Común, 2018
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Oxford Literary Review, 2018
Derrida's concept of survival, born out of Benjamin's work on translation in The Task of ... more Derrida's concept of survival, born out of Benjamin's work on translation in The Task of the Translator, has become a fixed element of readings of his work in recent years. Of particular interest in his final seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign and The Death Penalty, survival might be said to do to the concept of life what writing had done to that of speech. In this essay, I explore how the Derridean concept of survival, far from excluding dreams of immortality, in fact opens them. By putting deconstruction into contact with biotechnological fantasies of brain uploading and biological immortality, this essay asks what deconstruction's love of life might be able to teach us about the desire for immortal life in general, and biotechnological ventures, such as Dmitri Itskov's 2045 Initiative, in particular.
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Postmodern Culture, 2016
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Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2015
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MLN, 2015
Poe, éprouvant peut-être le sinistre pressentiment d’une fin subite, avait désigné MM. Griswold e... more Poe, éprouvant peut-être le sinistre pressentiment d’une fin subite, avait désigné MM. Griswold et Willis pour mettre ses œuvres en ordre, écrire sa vie, et restaurer sa mémoire. Ce pédagogue-vampire a diffamé longuement son ami dans un énorme article plat et haineux, juste en tête de l’édition posthume de ses œuvres. –Il n’existe donc pas en Amérique d’ordonnance qui interdise aux chiens l’entrée des cimetières?
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Research in Phenomenology, 2022
This essay explores the importance of Donner le temps II within the context of Derrida's writings... more This essay explores the importance of Donner le temps II within the context of Derrida's writings on Heidegger and the gift. In the first section of the essay, I situate the publication of the latter half of Derrida's 1978-79 seminar against his writings on the gift generally, beginning in 1968 and ending in 2000. In the second section, I explain how the second volume of Donner le temps relates to the first. In the final three sections of the paper, I focus on three prominent topics of the seminar, so as to show how they impact our previous understanding of major aspects of Derrida's thought: first, the Heideggerian thinking of the es gibt, as it relates to the gift's unconditionality. Second, the problematic of the Kunstwerk, as it informs Derrida's thinking of récit. Third, the problem of Dichtung, as it is linked to the poématique.
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Poetics Today, 2021
Beginning in 2008, with the French publication of The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, Éditions... more Beginning in 2008, with the French publication of The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, Éditions Galilée, the University of Chicago Press and an international editorial team initiated the process of editing, publishing, and translating, in reverse chronological order, the complete seminars of Jacques Derrida. These seminars, given variously at the Sorbonne, the École normale supérieure (ENS), the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, the University of California, Irvine, the New School for Social Research, the Cardozo Law School, and New York University, encompass material presented as early as 1959 and as late as 2003. With Derrida’s death in 2004, the seminar publications—projected to continue well into the 2050s—became the principal source of all Derrida’s future, posthumous publications, now under the direction of Katie Chenoweth, director of the Bibliothèque Derrida, at the French publishing house Éditions du Seuil. This special issue of Poetics Today addresses two questions that are raised by this enterprise: First, how does the publication, mediatization, and mass dissemination of Derrida’s teaching transform his corpus? Second, how does this corpus already speak to, anticipate, and pre-program the virtualization, translation, and transmission of the space of “the seminar”?
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SubStance, 2019
In "Clon'd" I ask in what way the problem of the "clone," as it confronts us today, can be separa... more In "Clon'd" I ask in what way the problem of the "clone," as it confronts us today, can be separated from modern and ancient questions concerning naming. Beginning with a philological analysis of the word "clone," I then turn to the conceptual parallels between vegetative reproduction and linguistic reproduction. Through a comparison between the clone and the double, I argue, by way of conclusion, that the fear of the clone corresponds to a relatively new notion of genetic identity, which has repercussions far beyond the biotechnological realm.
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Oxford Literary Review, 2018
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Books by Adam R Rosenthal
Papers by Adam R Rosenthal
This seminar is interested in exploring such failed attempts, as well as the proliferation of reproductive technologies that emerge in their wake. It wants to think together the various projects of archivization, supplementation, inscription, and body modification, etc., that are made in the name of immortality and life extension, as well as to explore the relations among what may survive in them, be it a name, fame, memory, beauty, a soul, mind, DNA, a body, code, ashes, or nothing. The seminar is particularly interested in how the “body” or the “self” becomes involved in processes of supplementation, prostheticization, cyborgification, and poeticization so as to achieve this end, and the modes (literary, technological, biological, aesthetic, etc.) through which they are ventured.
Some topics that participants may choose to explore include:
-Poetic discourse as a technic of immortalization
-Modern technological attempts at de-extinction, genetic engineering death, cryogenics, and blood transfusions, aiming to radically extend the upper limit of human life.
-Philosophy as learning how to die
-Heidegger on Dasein, mortality and immortality
-Nietzsche and the Eternal Return of the Same
-Biotech and the big business of radical life extension
-Renaissance Immortality
-Transgenic Poetry
-Derridean survivance and life-death
-Mechanical Reproduction and Biological Reproduction
-Textual Lives and Afterlives