A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law

A witness faints on the stand during the Eichmann trial. This Essay will explore the meaning of this unexpected legal moment, and will ask: Is the witness\u27s collapse relevant-and if so, in what sense-to the legal framework of the trial? How does this courtroom event affect the trial\u27s definition of legal meaning in the wake of the Holocaust? Under what circumstances and in what ways can the legal default of a witness constitute a legal testimony in its own right? I will present, first, Hannah Arendt\u27s reading of this episode, and will later contrast her reading with my own interpretation of this courtroom scene. Still later, I will analyze the judges\u27 reference to this scene

Sobrevivência postal, ou a questão do umbigo

Se ler é, de fato, “entender, … esquecer, … repetir,” como podemos repetir ainesquecível lição de leitura de De Man? Eis a questão preliminar deste ensaio que encena um diálogo de leituras entrelaçadas em um ponto de desconhecidoao qual Freud chamou de “umbigo do sonho”. O diálogo entre os textos, entreleituras, vai girar explicitamente e vai se desdobrar implicitamente em tornode três questões: (1) O que quer uma mulher? (2) O que é um umbigo? -- emFreud, em minha leitura dele, na leitura de De Man de ambos; (3) O que signifca, de fato, colocar uma questão ao nível do umbigo

At stramme fortolkningens skrue

At stramme fortolkningens skru

Embodied Discourses of Literacy in the Lives of Two Preservice Teachers

This study examines the emerging teacher literacy identities of Ian and A.J., two preservice teachers in a graduate teacher education program in the United States. Using a poststructural feminisms theoretical framework, the study illustrates the embodiment of literacy pedagogy discourses in relation to the literacy courses’ discourse of comprehensive literacy and the literacy biographical discourses of Ian and A.J. The results of this study indicate the need to deconstruct how the discourse of comprehensive literacy limits how we, as literacy teacher educators, position, hear and respond to our preservice teachers and suggests the need for differentiation in our teacher education literacy courses

Madness and the law: The Derrida/Foucault debate revisited

In this article the Derrida/Foucault debate is scrutinised with two closely related aims in mind: (1) reconsidering the way in which Foucault’s texts, and especially the more recently published lectures, should be read; and (2) establishing the relation between law and madness. The article firstly calls for a reading of Foucault which exceeds metaphysics with the security it offers, by taking account of Derrida’s reading of Foucault as well as of the heterogeneity of Foucault’s texts. The article reflects in detail on a text of Derrida on Foucault (‘Cogito and the History of Madness’) as well as a text of Foucault on Blanchot (‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside’). The latter text shows that Foucault was at times acutely aware of the difficulty involved in exceeding metaphysics and that he realised the importance in this regard of a reflection on literature. These reflections tie in closely with Foucault’s History of Madness as well as with Derrida’s reflections on literature and on madness. Both Derrida and Foucault contend that law has much to learn from literature in understanding the relation between itself and madness. Literature more specifically points to law’s ‘origin’ in madness. The article contends that a failure to take seriously this origin, also in the reading of Foucault’s lectures, would amount to a denial by law of itself

"To Tell the Story": Cultural Trauma and Holocaust Metanarrative

This article explores the aporia between the alleged inexplicability of the Holocaust and the wealth of narrative that has proceeded from the event in the years since 1945, proposing the existence of a generic Holocaust metanarrative that has been adopted and inscribed into Western cultural memory as the accepted framework for interpretation. Taking as a starting point the idea that culture itself has been somehow ‘ruptured’ in the wake of the Holocaust, this article explores the ways in which this rupture manifests itself, viewing the shattering impact of the Holocaust on the Western cultural imagination as macrocosmically comparable to the impact of psychic trauma on the individual survivor of the Holocaust. Just as an individual act of narration (the act of testimony) is believed to provide a cure for trauma, so a collective act of narration may hold the key to repairing the post-Holocaust cultural rupture. During the exploration of this process, it becomes apparent that cultural memory of the Holocaust is in fact informed by a metanarrative account that appears to offer the possibility of an engagement with the Holocaust, but which in fact acts as a screen between the event itself and the culture that would seek to memorialize it. Finally, this article explores the notion that the most appropriate narrative response is one that accepts the impossibility of its own position, rejecting the easy redemption offered by the assimilation of Holocaust metanarrative and instead inhabiting the dialectic between knowing and understanding that the Holocaust presents

Folie et discours chez Balzac "l'Illustre Gaudissart".

Felman Shoshana. Folie et discours chez Balzac "l'Illustre Gaudissart".. In: Littérature, n°5, 1972. Littérature. Février 1972. pp. 34-44

« Aurélia » ou « le livre infaisable » : de Foucault à Nerval

Felman Shoshana. « Aurélia » ou « le livre infaisable » : de Foucault à Nerval. In: Romantisme, 1971, n°3. "Le romantique réside dans le bariolé". pp. 43-55