Faithful and disappointing : reflections on the idea of Idola

In this brief article, reviewing Dustin Cauchi’s photomontage Idola, photography is seen as a medium caught in the short interspaces between life and art. Prompted by Larkin’s poetic distillation of photography as ‘faithful and disappointing’, the nature of these idola’s (non)faithfulness to life are examined with thoughts of performative elements and deception, and the nature of these fidelities is explored. The idola are further considered as eide, ‘the presentation to itself of being or the thing’, or, as with Hegel’s definition of art, as a sensuous manifestation of an idea. It is in this disappointment that they are faithful, and the realisation of the problematic nature of the illusion of proximity/immediacy that lies underneath the surface of such photographic instances is given its due consideration.peer-reviewe

Women write back : strategies of response and the dynamics of European literary culture, 1790–1805

Salvador Dali’s Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire adorns the front cover of Stephanie M. Hilger’s book, providing an oblique though fitting visual foretaste of what is to come. Under the gaze of an ambiguously marginalised slave girl in the left of the picture, the bust of Voltaire ‘‘disappears’’ or, rather, is disclosed to be not a solid, discrete object, but a space—a ruinous gap in once-monumental architecture, in fact—animated by a motley human gathering. There is, then, something transformative, indeed rather subversive, about the slave girl’s gaze. Yet, there is another gaze that must also be taken into consideration, namely that of the person viewing the painting who takes in the whole scene, viewing the girl’s subjective gaze objectively, comprehending at a distance the revisionary and appropriative mechanisms at work. It is this latter perspective that Hilger, with admirable skill and compelling clarity, seeks to open up in relation to women authors writing in the fraught social and political period immediately following the French Revolution.peer-reviewe

Blake, Yeats, Larkin : nihilism and the indifferent consolation of Post-Romanticism

It was during the Irish Civil War, sometime between 1922 and 1923, that W.B. Yeats, ensconced in Thoor Ballylee, the Norman tower that served both as a romantic, Samuel Palmer-esque symbol of the poet-scholar’s separate, elevated fixedness above the mundane, hurly burly world of his fellow man, as well as an actual stone and mortar defence against intrusions from the outside world, composed a sardonically barbed renunciation in verse of both poetic transcendence and the possibility of any sort of tide-stemming defence against what he saw as a general devaluation of values.peer-reviewe

Now : a Post-Romantic countertextuality of the contemporary

In this essay James Corby questions the dominant future-oriented nature of the ethical turn of theory and philosophy in the final decades of the twentieth century and its aesthetic influence. Focusing in particular upon the ethical position of Jacques Derrida, Corby argues that the desire to avoid the closure of the contemporary and to preserve the possibility of difference by cultivating a radical attentiveness to that which is ‘to come’ often risks a too complete disengagement from the present, leading to an empty and ineffectual ethical stance that actually preserves the contemporary situation that it seeks to open up. Corby makes a case for this theoretical investment in the possibility of a non-contemporary (typically futural) rupture as being understood as forming part of a far-reaching romantic tradition. In opposition to this tradition he sketches a post-romantic alternative that would understand difference as an immanent, rather than imminent, matter. He argues that this should be considered congruent with a countertextual impulse oriented not towards a revelatory futurity, but, rather, towards the possible displacements, dislocations, and transformations already inherent in the contemporary. The final part of the essay develops this idea, positioning countertextuality as the articulation of alternative contemporaries. In this regard, the literature of the future is not ‘to come’, it is already here. The challenge is to recognise it as such, and this means being prepared to modify and change the conceptual apparatus that guides us in our thinking of literature and the arts.peer-reviewe

The Hegel dictionary

Glenn Alexander Magee’s Hegel Dictionary is published as part of the recently launched and still expanding series, Continuum Philosophy Dictionaries, which already includes volumes devoted to luminaries such as Sartre, Gadamer, and Derrida, with many more titles on the great and the good of so-called ‘Continental’ philosophy about to go to press. Though the title of the book is unlikely to mislead anyone, it is perhaps worth stating that such works are “dictionaries” in a rather figurative sense, and that perhaps a more accurate way of thinking about them is as alphabetically ordered reference books. If anything, this only heightens their appeal. Who could not imagine a situation when, reading Hegel, one would benefit from hav- ing to hand a collection of concise, accessible and yet scholarly entries dealing with key Hegelian terms and concepts, his major works, and the philosophical figures that make up the intellectual milieu of which he is a part? For many readers of Hegel, though, this is not something that has to be imagined, as it has been a reality since the publication of Michael Inwood’s Hegel Dictionary (Black- well) almost twenty years ago. What those readers will no doubt be wondering is whether there is any reason to acquire a second Hegel Dictionary?peer-reviewe

The future(s) of literature?

What are we enquiring about when we ask about the future of literature? What do we mean by the future of literature? We are asking about how literature might be otherwise than it is now. But more than this, the question concerns how literature might in the future be otherwise than it is now. This is not the same as asking about how literature might be elsewhere, in other contemporary cultures, nor even how literature was or might have been in the past. The implicit claim is that in the future literature might be—or might have to be, if it is to survive—different in a distinct and unprecedented way. What might lead us to think that the future is a category that is unique in this regard, i.e. that it is the crucible in which and out of which a distinctly radical form of transformation might happen? Well, change is always temporal, but saying this doesn’t get us very far—we could, in this regard, just as well ask about the history of literature as the future of literature. The future, though, is unknowable in a way that the contemporary and the past isn’t. Even if we accede to the idea that there are inevitable epistemological constraints on our knowledge of the present and past, we would have to concede that the future is unknowable in a special way. However, if the future was indeed radically indeterminate— utterly unknowable—speculating on the future of literature would be pointless—at best a diverting but unedifying indulgence, the stuff of fantasy and daydreams. So we do have expectations, hopes and fears about the future and we have ideas about how the cultures that we are concerned with (literary and otherwise) are currently moving forward towards, or realising, the future.peer-reviewe

Originary translation in Cormac McCarthy’s the Road

Although it might not be immediately evident, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road, is a work of translation. By this I am not suggesting that there is a hitherto unacknowledged original version of the book in another language. Rather, I would like to reclaim the primary sense of translation and offer it as a description of The Road as a work of “transference; removal or conveyance from one person, place, or condition to another” (“Translation,” def. I.1.a)—a definition of translation now so peculiarly remote as to appear almost catachrestic.peer-reviewe

Making nothing happen : Yeats, Heidegger, Pessoa, and the emergence of Post-Romanticism

Through close readings of the work of two major poets of the twentieth century—W.B. Yeats and Fernando Pessoa—this paper identifies and attempts to make sense of an important shift in European modernism away from a broadly Romantic aesthetic toward what might be called “post-Romanticism.” Taking its cue from W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” where having stated that “poetry makes nothing happen” he asserts that it survives as “a way of happening,” and drawing on the philosophy of Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, this paper argues that this shift from Romanticism to post-Romanticism hinges on a deep metaphysical reconceptualization of poetry understood as poiesis. In light of this reassessment of the aesthetics and philosophical affinities of poetic modernism, it is argued that post-Romanticism should be understood as offering a modest, salutary, phenomenological re-acquaintance with our involvement with the everyday world, in sharp contrast to the transcendental ambitions of the Romantic aesthetic that preceded it.peer-reviewe

Critical indifference in the aesthetics and politics of Simon Critchley

Those of you who are familiar with Simon Critchley‟s work will know that he is fond of saying that philosophy begins not in wonder, but in disappointment. Well, I guess the same could be said of this paper. I‟ve followed Critchley‟s work with interest over the years but reading his most recent book, The Faith of the Faithless, I felt that his attempted appropriation of the affordances of faith, particularly as understood by heretical medieval Christianity in particular, in order to motivate secular political commitment, creates more problems than it solves. Faith of the Faithless is clearly a transition book—the move towards religious discourse and tradition is a move away from an interest in poetry that previously, in works such as Things Merely Are, his book on Wallace Stevens, he had tended to foreground; Critchley no doubt wouldn‟t see it like that, but there is a definite shift of interest; this sense of transition can also be understood as part of a gradual and as yet incomplete drift away from his earlier affinities with the work of Levinas and Derrida, towards people like Agamben and, most notably, Badiou—a move typical of the recent trajectory of theory away from the perceived negativity of poststructuralism and its various aftermaths, towards more affirmationist—often vitalist—philosophies pushing back against biopolitical forces (Benjamin Noys‟ The Persistence of the Negative is particularly insightful on this).peer-reviewe

The total work of art in European modernism

The “total work of art,” from the German Gesamtkunstwerk, is associated with Wagner’s desire for artworks to unify the various modes of artistic expression and form an integral part of the cultural and political life of a community. This conception of art was inspired by Greek drama, which brought together dance, music and poetry, and which seemed to later romantic and post-romantic artists and thinkers to have emerged organically in a manner that would suggest there was no strict demarcation between life and art. This much is commonly known, but there is a surprising dearth of scholarship devoted to exploring the idea of the total work of art more deeply.peer-reviewe