'Everything and nothing' : Shakespeare in Blanchot

This article discusses several moments in Maurice Blanchot’s work in which he delves into the space of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. For close contemporaries of Blanchot like Derrida and Levinas, Shakespeare is a decisive figure who inspires some of their major work. On the other hand, Shakespeare is not someone to whom Blanchot turns in decisive ways, except, perhaps, in a discussion of ‘Hamlet’ in The Space of Literature. The article discusses why Blanchot’s thinking may resist moving into the space of Shakespeare and proposes that, for Blanchot, Shakespeare’s name is inextricable from notions of human freedom and mastery that the modern work, which Blanchot is primarily interested in, dismisses. The (non-)relation with Shakespeare explored here reveals itself to be significant in what it discloses about Blanchot’s thought and the way he positions himself in relation to other writers.peer-reviewe

Encounters between disability studies and critical trauma studies : introduction

When setting up the premises for a dialogue between disability studies and critical trauma studies and embarking on editing this pilot issue on ‘encounters’ between the two disciplines, we necessarily welcomed interdisciplinary approaches, ranging across disability studies, trauma studies, literary and cultural studies, media studies, as well as many other disciplines in the humanities. The first step in introducing this issue to our readers will be to present the histories of both disability studies and trauma studies in order to see how they evolved and see why our proposal that they should meet half way or at least more often can be considered a valid opeer-reviewe

Witnessing Horrorism: The Piteşti Experiment

This article presents an irrational, sadistic experiment based on cruelty and complete disregard of human values, carried out between 1949 and 1952 in Romania and known under the infamous name of the Piteşti experiment. Its agenda was based on ‘re-education’, metaphorically presented as a sort of ‘healing’, supposedly performed to eliminate the ‘rot’ from prisoners. In the light of existent theories on the process of witnessing and testifying, I explore Dumitru Bacu’s, Grigore Dumitrescu’s, Paul Goma’s and Virgil Ierunca’s accounts of this despicable experiment and discuss the different roles assumed by witnesses while writing about Piteşti. Using the notions of ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ as developed in the works of Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero, as well as Judith Lewis Herman’s findings from Trauma and Recovery and Anne-Marie Roviello’s work on ‘the hidden violence of totalitarianism’, the article suggests how the Piteşti experiment can be compared to the Shoah. Through this comparison, I point out the ‘unnarratability’ of the events that happened in the Piteşti penitentiary and, explaining the positions of the victims, I discuss the elements that made this experiment a uniquely tragic event in the history of communist prisons: on the one hand, that any tortured prisoner was forced to become the torturer of his fellows, on the other hand, that no one was allowed to die

Layers of Memory in Kuznetsov’s and Trubakov’s Babi Yar Narratives

This article examines two memoirs of authors who indirectly witnessed the horrendous crimes committed by Nazi Einsatzgruppen squads in Babi Yar where more than 33,000 of the Jewish inhabitants of Kiev were brutally murdered on 29–30 September 1941: Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel and Ziama Trubakov’s The Riddle of Babi Yar: The True Story Told by a Survivor of the Mass Murders in Kiev, 1941–1943. Starting from Kuznetsov’s final remarks on the power of memory that will never fade even if only few witnesses or survivors remained to tell the story, I will show what types of witnessing occur in both memoirs: the two narrators use both “ear-witnessing” (Susan Vice’s term), eye-witnessing, and “flesh-witnessing” (Yuval Noah Harari’s term) in the structure of their books and, following Amos Goldberg’s model for first-person Holocaust memoirs and diaries, I will show how these three types of witnessing unfold the story of Babi Yar

Postcommunism- postcolonialism's other: special issue of "Word and Text. A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics"

Résumés des articles consultables en ligne à http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/No_1_2012.htmlInternational audienceIn spite of Derrida's timely Specters of Marx and of the critical activity that it generated, as well as Stéphane Courtois's The Black Book of Communism, the responses to which responses varied from highly enthusiastic support to bitter criticism, out of all the many post'somethings, post(-)communism1 as such has not received the theoretical attention it should have otherwise deserved. The editors of this issue attempt to fill this gap, by proposing a rapprochement between post(-)communism and post(-)colonialism, yet not without expressing some doubts and reflections as to the legitimacy of this parallel.En dépit de la publication de l'ouvrage Spectres de Marx de Derrida, et de l'activité critique qu'il a générée, tout comme du Livre noir du communisme coordonné par Stéphane Courtois, ayant suscité des réactions des plus enthousiastes, mais aussi des prises de position épidermiques, de tous les " post ", le " post-communisme " n'a pas encore reçu l'attention théorique nécessaire. Les contributions de ce volume cherchent à combler ce manque, à la lumière d'un rapprochement entre postcommunisme et postcolonialisme, et avec la conscience des limites et des questions liées à la légitimité d'un tel parallèle