The Fine Art of Writing Posthumous Papers: On the Dubious Role of the Romantic Fragment in the First Part of Either/Or

The Fine Art of Writing Posthumous Papers: On the Dubious Role of the Romantic Fragment in the First Part of Either/O

Marx’ spøgelser ifølge Derrida

– med afstikkere til Kierkegaard, Shakespeare og Sartre Marx’ ghosts according to Derrida: With sideglances at Kierkegaard, Shakespeare and SartreThe article is about Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx [Specters of Marx, hereafter Spectres] which is his most elaborate statement on Marx and Marxism. In this work, the phenomena of ghosts and haunting play a very significant role. Derrida connects ghosts to a fundamental anachronism, something he underscores by emphasizing and generalizing Hamlet’s line in Hamlet: »The time is out of joint«. The concept of the ghost is also generalized and Derrida calls for the formation of a couple of novel sciences: spectralogy and hauntology. Spectres had a significant and immediate effect; the work became the object of heated debate amongst Marxist scholars and books and articles about especially literary and psychoanalytic ghosts proliferated in its wake.After introducing Spectres, the article focuses upon the Marxist critique of the work offered by Richard Halpern, arguing that Halpern ignores the question of language and therefore misses the point of Derrida’s reading of Marx (and perhaps also of Hamlet). Then follows a discussion of the section in Spectres on the relationship between use and exchange-value and thereby also on the famous dancing table in Marx’s Capital. Via a detour to Sartre it is suggested that the concept of the imaginary is of importance in relation to Derrida’s understanding of the dance of the table. This is elaborated via another detour, this one to Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, which is motivated by the fact that nothingness is a key constituent of the conception of the imaginary in Sartre and of anxiety in Kierkegaard.Nothingness is quite as central to Kierkegaard’s conception of irony, while irony is also linked to haunting in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony. This fact is explored in the final part of the article which also draws parallels between the relationship between language and the market in Spectres and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The conclusion is that Derrida focuses on the nothingness of ghosts and the imaginary in order to sound a warning against the formation of rigid conceptions of human history and the history of human labour which Marxism more often than not has constructed.

»A wounded name«

Om dobbeltgængermotivet i Edgar Allan Poes forfatterskab i almindelighed og i »William Wilson« i særdeleshe

>>Loven hungrer ud

Om lovens bogstav hos Kierkegaard og Kafk

Et kontranivellerende tids-skrift

Kierkegaards En litterair Anmeldels

Chiasmens kors: korsets chiasmer

Om en kierkegaardsk tankefigu

»Thy Paleness Moves Me More than Eloquence«: Om Shakespeare som magtfuld forgænger og om voldsformer og genremæssig ustabilitet i The Merchant of Venice

»Thy Paleness Moves Me More than Eloquence«: On Shakespeare as a Powerful Precursor and on Forms of Violence and the Instability of Genres in The Merchant of Venice:The article is about how Shakespeare is a precursor of ours whose works can still haunt us because, as Harold Bloom amongst others has pointed out, in uncanny ways they seem to be aware of, reflect and often even subvert the ideas, ideologies and anxieties of our modernity. The relationship between Marx/Marxism and Shakespeare is of specific interest in the article.First, and following Peter Stallybrass, it is discussed how Marx appreciated Shakespeare in general and, more specifically, in a way rewrote Hamlet in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, thus perhaps bearing witness to Marjorie Garber’s observation that this play is especially powerful in ensnaring us in its trap.The main focus hereafter, however, is The Merchant of Venice, a play in which the power of money to regulate our ideas and ideals behind our backs is obviously a major theme. Following Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy, it is sketched out to what extent money talks in the play, in effect stripping all ethical ideals and honourable intents and emotions of the characters of any credit whatsoever. Thus, violence permeates the play, since all relations depicted in it turn out to be coercive or manipulative – or something even more vile – in one way or another. In the famous court-scene, the character of Portia, who rhetorically praises the power of Christian mercy, even appears to be sadistic in a way which involves the audience too. In addition to this, the final trick with the rings, which Portia and Nerissa play on their husbands, is also of a quite sadistic nature.Therefore, and following Daniel J. Korstein’s comments on the matter, it is not easy to determine whether one is witnessing – or being subjected to – a comedy or a tragedy or something entirely different. The only thing which is certain is that lofty political and ethical ideals are thoroughly debunked in and by this play which could be said to prefigure indirectly the unmasking of ideology which Marx endeavoured to carry out

Kierkegaard & Nietzsche & Slavemoralen

Jacob Bøggild: Kierkegaard & Nietzsche & Slavemorale

Set sådan lidt fra oven. - Om det unaturlige i narratologien og i J.P. Jacobsens "Et Skud i Taagen"

AS VIEWED SOMEWHAT FROM ABOVE | First; the relationship between the two positions of natural and unnatural narratology is discussed. It is pointed out that even if they appear to live together in relative harmony and supplement each other in productive ways, they may have to disagree more fundamentally with each other if they are to formulate their respective conceptions of language. Subsequently, an exemplary reading of J.P. Jacobsen’s short story “Et skud i Taagen” is undertaken.First, the question of genre is discussed, since the story appears to be a ghost story that does not really want to be such a story in a traditional sense. Todorov’s idea that the fantastic in literature originates from rhetorical figures becomes the point of departure for a further reading of the story. It is demonstrated that the literalization of a now forgotten idiom, the becoming fictional reality of a simile, and metonymy, is what conjures up the ghost in the narrative. The unnatural or supernatural is thus a product of language in the strictest sense possible. Furthermore, another rhetorical or literary phenomenon, namely free indirect speech, is used with devious effects by Jacobsen, since it is evoked to produce a couple of perspectives or points of view that are simplyimpossible. The literary language of the story can thus not only conjure up the unnatural or supernatural, it can also blind the reader to the sheer impossibility of what is written on the page