Jim Hicks,
Narrowing the Range of Permissible Lies: Recent Battles in the International Image
Tribunal - Abstract: The essay investigates the
representational constraints and presuppositions that generate images of war and
influence their reception, or lack of reception, by the U.S. public. Such journalism
still largely follows representational practices put into place during the eighteenth
century, a structure of representation that has outlived its usefulness. Following
Bruno Latour's observation that, for critique, the "question was never to get away
from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing
empiricism," it is suggested that recent controversies over war photos, and over those
of Abu Ghraib in particular, often substitute an argument about images for one that
confronts the acts they depict. The "prisoner abuse" story is of course far from
settled; in fact it's hardly been opened. And yet, as Ernesto Sábato's preface
to Nunca Más (the work published by the Argentine National
Commission on the Disappeared) demonstrated long ago, properly applied, even
narratology can have policy implications. --jh
Robert Hughes,
Riven: Badiou's Ethical Subject and the Event of Art as Trauma
- Abstract:
The essay opens with a general consideration of art and ethics in Badiou's philosophy in
order to describe his subject as faithful to an event that pierces a given situation
with its hitherto indiscernible truth. The essay then establishes connections between
Badiou's work on the void of the situation, the hole of truth, and the rivenness of the
subject, and Lacan's work on trauma and the real. This connection is seen in Badiou's
description of truth as a radical alterity befalling the subject and constituting a hole in the existing order of language. The subject remains ethically faithful to a
truth by introducing it into the language of the situation in which that truth appears.
Because the existing situation cannot articulate a truth radically novel and alterior to
itself, the subject must "poeticize" in order to name any truth, as this essay
shows, whether artistic, amorous, political, or scientific. By describing Badiou's
subject of art in terms of trauma, Badiou's theory of art is placed in relation with
that of the Romantics. By describing Badiou's ethical subject in terms of trauma, the
essay places
Badiou's ethics in relation to Levinas's. The extent and limits of this comparison
clarify Badiou's critique of Levinas, which is less general than commonly supposed, and
help to intervene in potential misreadings of Badiou's work, which resists the
pathos and horror typically attached to ethical considerations of trauma and the real.
--rh
E.L. McCallum,
Toward a Photography of Love: The Tain of the Photograph in Anne Carson's
Autobiography of Red
- Abstract:
This essay examines the idea of the verbal photograph, particularly those in
Anne Carson's novel Autobiography of Red and Barthes's winter garden
photograph
in Camera Lucida. The essay argues for a reconsideration of classic
photography theory in light of the tensions around these seemingly absent photographs,
suggesting that a counterpoint to the dominant equation of photography and
death in photography theory is the alliance, abetted through narrative, of
photography and love.
--em
Jeffrey T. Nealon,
The Swerve Around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation
- Abstract: The "P" in "The Swerve around 'P'" refers to the Library of
Congress designation for language, literature, and literary criticism/theory; the
essay reflects on the fact that a lot of the work that's produced in literature
departments these days doesn't end up in that section of the library (or, conversely,
much of the research on the "P" shelves finds its primary engagements elsewhere: in
history, sociology, science and technology, philosophy, social science, and so on).
Literary scholarship isn't "literary" in quite the same way it was even a decade ago,
in the sense that it's no longer primarily concerned with producing rival
interpretations of existing or emerging literary artifacts. The reason there's no hot
new interpretive paradigm on the horizon is not so much because of the exhaustion of
theory itself, but because the work of interpretation is no longer the primary
research work of literature departments. However, it is precisely in the name of
re-imagining a research future for literary theory that I turn to Alain Badiou's
account of the literary's demise in recent philosophy. My provocation here, if I have
one at all, is to ask theoreticians to rethink possible relations among literature and
philosophy, other than in the key of interpretation--which (despite ubiquitous claims
to the contrary) has been the dominant research practice of the "big theory" era in
North America.--jtn
Carrie Noland, Motor Intentionality: Gestural
Meaning in Bill Viola and Merleau-Ponty
- Abstract: The rise of new media studies has brought attention to
artists such as Bill Viola while renewing scholarly interest in the works of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This essay provides analyses of Merleau-Ponty and Viola
that go against the grain of current scholarship on them both. By privileging
the category of the gestural--central in Merleau-Ponty's meditations but often
eclipsed in recent criticism--the essay contradicts a trend in new media theory
that associates embodiment not with motor intentionality but instead with a far
more mysterious entity called "affect." Reading Viola's The Passions
through Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, the essay brings to
bear the author's experience as a movement practitioner to restore the register of
gestural performance to Viola's visual images.
--cn
Copyright © 2007-1990 Postmodern Culture & the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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.
|