Abstracts
Volume 18, Number 2January, 2008
- Abstract: This essay considers the digital avatar not simply as a name for a virtual double of the player of videogames, but as bound to or manifesting psychological drive, a kind of homunculus of the drive. Drawing on a wide range of theories that have informed technical constructions of the subject, it applies in particular an important moment in Lacan's description of the drive to the concept of the gaming "avatar." It argues that the avatar is a variant of precursor representations of the drive specific to the technical imaginary of videogames. --ea
- Abstract: This essay inquires into the uncanny, unpredictable, and terrifying dimension of Levinasian ethics that retains the trace of impersonal existence or il y a (there is). After establishing that being, labor, and sense are but folds in the infinite fabric of the there is, the folds that Levinas terms "hypostasis," the article follows the double possibility of their unfolding or unraveling into two infinities: that of il y a and that of the ethical relation. The focus is on the inflection of the second infinity by the first, detectable in the "inter-face" of justice and ethics in the unique Other who/that contains the anonymous third (illeity), in the facelessness of the face connoted by the French visage and the Hebrew panim, and in the Other's nocturnal non-phenomenality. "Terror of the ethical" concludes with the hypothesis that ethics does not stifle the primordial horror of the there is but temporalizes it, thriving on the boundlessness and passivity it introduces into my existence and leaving enough time to fear for the Other. --mm
- Abstract: This essay explores some of the points of contact between philosophical reflection and dance. Paying close attention to way the figure of dance is put to work in texts by Norbert Elias, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Man, Plato, and Jacques Derrida, the essay teases out a connection between the philosophical gesture of exemplification, the non sequitur whereby the abstract is propped up by or otherwise made to lean upon the concrete, and the move to an "outside" of the text understood either simply as reference, or more ambitiously as revolution. When, as is the case with the texts attended to here, dance is the example exemplified, a swirling field of reflexive associations arise around it, associations that invite us to recognize in dance a stance to be taken, perhaps even a set of steps to be followed, as activists and scholars alike contemplate what will be required to get from one world to another.--jm
- Abstract: Bruno Latour has turned to Indian vernacular fiction to illustrate the limits of ideology critique. In examining the method of literary analysis that underlies his appropriation of postcolonial history and culture, we appeal to Edward Said's notion of "traveling theory" in order to discuss critically the aesthetic as well as political stakes of using the technology of the modern novel for the allegorical purposes that Latour has in mind. We argue that Latourian analysis fails to uphold its own rigorous aspirations when it reduces complex literary and cultural representation to universal allegory. --ar and es
- Abstract: This essay examines the dynamics of what Marianne Hirsch and others have called "postmemory" in French writer Patrick Modiano's hybrid 1997 text Dora Bruder. In seeking to advance our understanding of the workings of postmemory--its potentialities, and inescapable risks, as an ethical and critical practice--the author distinguishes postmemory from trauma and argues that postmemory and trauma rely on different relationships to representation, referentiality, and the archive. While trauma theory posits a mode of transitivity that implicates us in the traumas of others on the basis of the collapse of representation, the transitivity that animates postmemory functions on the condition of (equivocal) representational success. The essay explores how Modiano's particular postmemorial project carries on an implicit and explicit dialogue with key surrealist works, authors, concepts, and practices. Postmemory and surrealism each operates at an experimental seam between interiority and exteriority, and Modiano's engagement with surrealism illuminates salient aspects of postmemory, even as Modiano's historical distance from interwar surrealism and its central aspirations demarcates his own "postmemorial" predicament. The essay concludes that while, and largely because, it remains irreducibly problematic as an epistemological and ethical project, Modiano's work of postmemorial recovery offers a productive counterpoint to the ethics and critical practice based on the presumption, and performance, of the collapse of representation that we find not only in trauma theory but also in Giorgio Agamben's highly influential post-Auschwitz ethics of witnessing. --ser
Emily Apter, Technics of the Subject: The Avatar-Drive
Michael Marder, Terror of the Ethical: On Levinas's Il y a
John Mowitt, Spins
Amit Ray and Evan Selinger, Jagannath's Saligram: On Bruno Latour and Literary Critique After Postcoloniality
Sven-Erik Rose, Remembering Dora Bruder: Patrick Modiano's Surrealist Encounter with the Postmemorial Archive
Copyright © 2008-1990 Postmodern Culture CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. A TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE OF THE JOURNAL IS ALSO AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR FULL HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE, THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.
