The Profanation of Revelation: On Language and Immanence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben

This essay seeks to articulate the many implications which Giorgio Agamben’s work holds for theology. It aims therefore to examine his (re)conceptualizations of language, in light of particular historical glosses on the ‘name of God’ and the nature of the ‘mystical’, as well as to highlight the political task of profanation, one of his most central concepts, in relation to the logos said to embody humanity’s ‘religious’ quest to find its Voice. As such, we see how he challenges those standard (ontotheological) notions of transcendence which have been consistently aligned with various historical forms of sovereignty. In addition, I intend to present his redefinition of revelation as solely the unveiling of the ‘name of God’ as the fact of our linguistic being, a movement from the transcendent divine realm to the merely human world before us. By proceeding in this manner, this essay tries to close in on one of the largest theological implications contained within Agamben’s work: the establishment of an ontology that could only be described as a form of ‘absolute’ immanence, an espousal of some form of pantheism (or perhaps panentheism) yet to be more fully pronounced within his writings

Time in French, or Nabokov’s Mobile Image of Eternity

In his first published interview, Nabokov, then living in Berlin, said that there was no German influence on his work, but that “one might properly speak about a French influence” (Lectures on Literature, xx). This French influence was of many sorts, and began as early as Nabokov could remember, with his learning of the language as a small boy and his voracious early reading of its literature (he claimed, for instance, to have read all of Flaubert by the age of fifteen [Boyd, 1990, 91]). Fren..

Vladimir Nabokov et la France

L'ouvrage Vladimir Nabokov et la France explore un espace de recherche vaste et peu balisé : l'invention de la France dans l'œuvre de Nabokov et l'étude interdisciplinaire de son héritage français. L'écrivain russo-américain a entretenu avec la langue et la culture françaises une relation riche et intense dont la complexité se dévoile dans ce volume, qui ouvre un nouveau champ dans les études nabokoviennes à la croisée de plusieurs disciplines (études américaines, comparées, françaises et slaves) et de plusieurs forma­tions (linguistes, narratologues, philologues, traducteurs et artistes). Par-delà les considérations biographiques, cet ouvrage met en lumière la nature des liens à double sens entre la culture française et l'œuvre de l'écrivain, à savoir la place du cadre géographique et culturel de la France dans son œuvre, celle des écrivains et textes français, son usage de la langue française, sa relation à la pensée française, et enfin sa postérité dans le paysage littéraire et artistique français. De manière significative, le choix du bilinguisme pour les articles publiés ici vise à dépasser la division linguistique de la cri­tique nabokovienne en s'adressant aux lecteurs tant anglophones que francophones et, de manière plus profonde, à penser Nabokov dans les deux langues.À la mémoire de Samuel Schuman (1942-2014

Thinking relationality in Agamben and Levinas

Giorgio Agamben’s development of a messianic politics-to-come seeks to counter the law which is in force without significance, a law which creates bare life. Embodying this messianic politics, and a call for the law’s fulfilment, is the figure of whatever-being, a form-of-life. This article contends that there is an important conceptual problem in respect of Agamben’s construction of such a form-of-life, namely the issue of relationality. The problem of relationality in Agamben is explored here through the comparative lens of relationality in Levinas’s thought. It is contended that Agamben’s messianic subject, his form-of-life, has a negative relation to its other, in contrast to Levinas’s positive, subject forming view of relationality