P. T. Anderson’s Dilemma: the Limits of Surrogate Paternity

P.T. Anderson's latest film, There Will Be Blood, represents both a culmination and a crisis within his career-long investigation of the limits of paternity and the solace of surrogacy. By pressing that ongoing antagonism to a kind of absurd extreme in Daniel Day Lewis' performance, this paper argues that Anderson undoes it and leaves his future possible direction unclear. Further, by battening on the corpus of Upton Sinclair's 1926 novel, Anderson introduces a political unconscious that his rigorous reduction to a family drama cannot fully contain or defuse

‘The Wire’ and Realism

‘I’m not a Marxist,’ David Simon has been heard to insist, even though, on the basis of his masterpiece, the five-season HBO sleeper-hit crime series The Wire, ‘I’m often mistaken for a Marxist.’ And there are good reasons, given the ongoing conventional relationship between Marxism and the kind of realism for which his show is generally celebrated, why the label continues to be applied. For 'The Wire' concerns itself with the same kind of social canvas as was assayed by that ‘splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England’ whose members (Thackeray, Dickens, Gaskell, etc.) first began to make of their contemporary social space a proper object for aesthetic pedagogy. That this now takes place on television, rather than a triple-decker novel, is the signal innovation of a program that patently advertises itself in terms usually reserved for literature. This, in turn, would seem to invite an analytical consideration of the series from the sorts of critical and theoretical perspectives the realist novel has engendered - a task this paper undertakes

Transferring Suspiria: Historicism and Philosophies of Psychoanalytic Transference

Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018) aggressively foregrounds a term from the discourse of psychoanalysis, now a relic of twentieth-century philosophical and psychological thought, with which to negotiate a sequence of historical problems specific to its articulation as a remake (adaptation or reimagining) of a 1977 giallo by Dario Argento. The concept is “transference”. Transference traverses the whole semantic field of this film text, offering a hermeneutic device that, we will show, structures its conception and execution. This interpretative tool affords us a conceptual means with which to appreciate the decidedly querulous attitude that Guadagnino's remake assumes as regards its source text. Lodged in what can be described as an antagonism over the “spirit” of a film shot in 1977 is, we feel, a profound difference of opinion over the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and thus a contest over the very concept of a film's “spirit”. Argento's classic deliberately “spiritualizes” the political context of its creation, and particularly its setting during the German Autumn of 1977, in order to produce an oneiric fairy-tale nightmare about innocence abroad. The “spirit” of Suspiria is what must be sacrificed in the 2018 adaptation, in order to rescue its material basis from the amnesia of posterity. This is a film about its own historicism and about historicism in general, and what it costs to produce a “terrible beauty” out of the violence of terror. It is a materialist intervention in the culture of recycling, and offers, as a remake, a critical reading of a film apparently immune to the principle of a remake.Alexander Howard, Julian Murphe

On the mortification of novelistic discourse in Three novels

This paper argues for a specific labour of form in the so-called Trilogy, namely, the irreversible mortification of novelistic discourse. The great three-novel sequence is the literary space in which Beckett contrived to have done with his most dangerous temptations towards “life and invention”, in and around the generic tar-pits of the comic novel. With implacable resolve, the author laid out before him the generic coordinates - novelistic narration; novelistic description; novelistic characterization; and the novelistic calibration of ‘opinions’ - only to take each to the internal limit of its humanistic delusion. The result is a leave-taking with a difference: not the sudden supersession or heroic vanquishing of ‘novelism’, but its laborious mortification, in order to immunise the promise of some form to come against the lingering infections of a now undead genre. Beckett's path through the novel was immanent, subjecting it to a process of degradation and internal dissolution, rather than attacking it through satire or side-stepping it altogether. The new form toward which he was reaching could only be attained through this patient and systematic dismantlement of the novel form from within its own coordinates. Reviewing the accelerating and metastasizing immanent critique from novel to novel in the Trilogy, this essay demonstrates how remorseless and logical it was, and how the momentum it gained served an aesthetic ambition that was also a biographical purgation: never again would Beckett attempt a novel. From this point forward, prose was liberated to serve non-novelistic ends

Rosa plus Emma: politično ugodje in užitek uma

Today we face broadly the return of an old tension internal to Left politics: a prodigious and rather pleasureless theoretical resurgence of Marxian categories and economic analyses, alongside a febrile activist political culture of occupations, flash mobs and riots. Rather than look to the tired pantheon of usual suspects in conflict (Marx vs Bakunin, Lenin vs Gesell, etc), this essay excavates a pseudo-couple of the far more enabling Deleuzian “and…and…” type, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, to see what their juxtaposition might have to offer contemporary debates and disagreements. In focus will be the distinctive part reserved for pleasure—physical, aesthetic, sexual, and sensual—in both their writings, and the structural relationship between it and revolutionary politics as a way of life. The essay seeks to imagine a sustainable left resource of “reason plus enjoyment” that can think against capital whilst persevering with the unconditional demands of a generalized libidinal insurgency. Rosa + Emma = death to Left Puritanism!Danes smo priča nenavadni vsesplošni vrnitvi stare napetosti znotraj levičarskih politik: neznanskemu teoretskemu preporodu marksističnih kategorij in ekonomskih analiz, a brez vsakršnega ugodja, ki ga spremlja vročična aktivistična politična kultura zasedb, »flash mobov« in nemirov. Raje kot da bi se oziral k zaprašenemu panteonu običajnih osumljencev in njihovih konfliktov (Marx vs. Bakunin, Lenin vs. Gessel itn.), bo pričujoči esej na površje pripeljal bolj produktiven deleuzovski »in…in…« psevdopar, Roso Luxemburg in Emmo Goldman, zato da bi ugotovil, kaj lahko njuno sopostavljanje ponudi sodobnim razpravam in nesoglasijem. V središču pozornosti bo razpravljanje o ugodju – fizičnemu, estetskemu, seksualnemu – kot ga lahko razberemo v njunem pisanju, kot tudi strukturnemu razmerju med le-tem in revolucionarnimi politikami kot načinom življenja. Esej si poskuša zamisliti trajnostni levičarski vir »uma plus užitka«, ki zmore misliti proti kapitalu, hkrati s tem, ko ohranja brezpogojne zahteve posplošenega libidinalnega upora. Rosa + Emma = smrt levemu puritanizmu

Faulkner's Media Romance

This book treats William Faulkner's major fiction--from Flags in the Dust through to Absalom, Absalom!--to a searching reappraisal under the spotlight of a media-historical inquiry