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This article discusses the function of tension in autobiographies written by eighteenth-century doctors George Cheyne, Francis Fuller, Claude Revillon, and the Viscount de Puysegur. It studies how their rhetorical strategies stir tensions in readers through the narration of their own periods of infirmity and search for a remedy. The descriptions of their recoveries offer resolution, legitimate their medical practices, and help diffuse their works. Through the staging of these reversals, the authors suggest a shift in the way the role of medical doctors was perceived as well as a fundamental change in their relationship to illness.
The article sketches a critical paradigm for interdisciplinary work that is centred on tension as a highly ambiguous and ultimately deeply paradoxical notion. It highlights that a unifying account of what tension is or a systematic classification of its diverse meanings would risk resolving tensions between different approaches and privileging a particular mode of doing so. Successively focussing on aesthetic, socio-political, and physical tensions, the essay articulates tension rather as a broad umbrella term that is stretched by multi-perspectival articulations, unified through its intensive surface tension, and at the same time full of transformative and generative potentials. In particular, it proposes that tensions between different cultural or disciplinary fields can be made productive by inducing tensions within each field so that different fields can be related to each other on the basis of tension rather than some substantial commonality.
This article shows that 'tension' cannot be conceived as a specific object of an analysis for which one could determine a precise field of enquiry. Instead, it establishes tension as a specific mode or angle of approach with which any given contingent object or set of objects can be explored. The wideness of its applicability and the specificity of its angle suggest that research on tension can help to unfold a better understanding of a classical ontological question concerning the essential value of actions and relations in the definition of what a thing is. The text follows this line of argumentation by pairing contemporary philosophical sources and specific aesthetic and political examples. Suggesting the possibility of an open classification of different modes of tension, it clarifies the extent to which the essential definition of a thing is bound to the contingent analysis of its transformations.
A trio of themes recur across prominent Western theories of laughter: violence, the human/nonhuman, and error. The paper traces this trio through a series of frequently cited paradigms for understanding laughter, including superiority, incongruity and relief theories, Henri Bergson's theory of laughter and V. S. Ramachandran's false alarm theory; and argues that it reflects a shared, if partially submerged concern with the instability and demise of a particular figure of the human, one that is circumscribed by the culturally specific (if globally influential) values of Eurocentric/Western thought, largely corresponding to Sylvia Wynter's 'Man'. This suggests that laughter has an ambiguous immanent potential for both undermining and/or reasserting, de- and/or restabilising the illusion of Man's universalizing drive to identify itself with the human per se.
The body of the actor : notes on the relationship between the body and acting in Pasolini's cinema
(2012)
Agnese Grieco's paper 'The Body of the Actor: Notes on the Relationship Between the Body and Acting in Pasolini's Cinema' deals with the specific physiognomy of the actor within Pasolini's 'cinema of poetry'. It argues that Pasolini's films allow the spectator to experience directly a complex and polyvalent reality beyond the traditional idea of 'representation'. As a fragment of that reality, actors quote and present themselves beyond and through their interpretations of a role. Instead of conceiving of the actor as a 'professional of fiction', Pasolini employs a variety of actors who are able fully to convey their own anthropological history. It is particularly the body of the actor, Grieco concludes, that becomes a door opening towards a deeper reality. For instance, the figure of Ninetto Davoli can push us back towards Greek antiquity, and the codified art of the comedian Totò or the iconic fixity of Maria Callas can interact with the African faces of the possible interpreters of an African Oresteia.
A small, blind-tooled volume sits on a table covered in green baize: one clasp is open, the other is closed; and a slip of paper emerges from it reading 'Veritas odium parit' ('truth breeds hatred'). This detail occurs in the foreground of a portrait by Hans Holbein of a young man identified as the Cologne patrician Hermann von Wedigh III (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A study of the physical features of the book and of the history of the brief text - actually an ancient and then Erasmian adage - leads to a new interpretation of the painting in the context of humanist friendship. The book is seen to be a multivalent simile for the work of art authored by the artist as well as for the sitter himself, raising questions about the implications for these of a medium that can be opened and closed. The half-open condition of the book is understood to reflect the complementary pressures of openness and closedness, accessibility and intimacy, that characterized the Renaissance republic of letters.
This paper focuses on an ongoing project that began in 2012, entitled "The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders". This project is an attempt to reconstitute the Marcos Collection. Sourced from auction catalogues, museum archives, and scant government records, their lavish inventory of commissioned portraits, jewellery, Regency silverware, and old master paintings is reproduced as photographic installations, postcards, and three-dimensional prints. Reconstruction, in this instance, becomes a sustained democratic gesture, allowing an increasingly forgetful public to access a collection that has remained unavailable through a systemic failure by successive post-dictatorial governments to institutionalize collective acts of remembering.
In its elusive form between drama, novel and film, "Teorema" marks a 'new turning point in Pasolini's oeuvre'. Both the narrative and the style are remarkable, juxtaposing elements of different genres, nourishing the unresolved tensions within the film: the family members are shown in various scenes that follow one another in seemingly random order. Instead of a cohesive narrative unfolding in time, there reigns a sense of timelessness that gives rise to an oppressive feeling of drifting. Claudia Peppel's essay 'The Guest: Transfiguring Indifference in "Teorema"' explores the figure of the guest, which has always been closely connected with myth and whose appearance often triggers the dramatic conflict. Peppel focuses on "Teorema", in which a sensual stranger causes a bourgeois family to acknowledge its delusions. When he departs, the members of the family are left in a state of unfulfilled yearning, searching for new meaning. While critical literature on Pasolini regularly points to the importance of the figure of the guest but rarely analyzes it, Peppel discusses theories of the guest and hospitality to illuminate the role of the stranger in Pasolini's film. The guest's exceptional state, which is removed from everyday life and removes others from their everyday lives, is meticulously staged and resembles the evenly-suspended attention of the psychoanalyst. He triggers projections, desires, and, ultimately, existential crises.
A paradigm for thinking about wholes, their constitution and re-production, has long been provided by living organisms. While the emphasis is often on the relation between parts and wholes - between the functionally differentiated organs and the organism, or, on a lower level, between cells and organs - Robert Meunier and Valentine Reynaud's essay 'The Innate Plasticity of Bodies and Minds: Integrating Models of Genetic Determination and Environmental Formation' poses the question of the whole in biology with respect to the organism and its environment. A developmental system involves not only what we conventionally discern as the organism, that is, initially, the fertilized egg and the cellular mass arising from it by cell division, but also the physical and biological surrounding of the developing embryo. In the sense that not every aspect of the environment plays a role, the organism as part of the system constitutes this whole by determining what has an effect on the process and what does not. On the other hand, by not only enabling development or providing material but instead shaping the process in specific ways, the whole of organism-environment interactions constitutes its part, i.e., the developing organism. If there are therefore different, potentially incommensurable constitutions of the whole developmental system, there are also different ways of identifying the relevant units of selection in evolution, such as the living organism as a whole or the genes as the units of replication. In their essay, Meunier and Reynaud argue for a view on development and evolution that integrates notions of environmental influence and genetic determination. The notion of plasticity that has recently gained currency in the life sciences seems to oppose genetic determination and innateness by underlining the importance of environmental influence. However, while morphological and cognitive development is indeed plastic and sensitive to the environment, the essay emphasizes that the mechanisms and elements enabling a system to respond to influences must be available for development to happen in the first place. These resources for development are not homogeneous 'stuff' that becomes formed by the environment through the course of development. Instead, they are highly structured and specific and thus enable specific responses to contextual conditions. Under varying conditions they will of course appear in different combinations and produce different outcomes. Thus, they enable plasticity. And yet, as they are specific mechanisms and elements, which mainly gain their specificity from the structure of the genetic material on which the environment can act, it appears appropriate to refer to them as innate.
The monastic enclosure
(2022)
The moral and physical enclosure of monks and nuns is central to the founding documents of Western monasticism. But even there it encountered the need for monasteries to interact with their societies, through recruits, hospitality, and the monastic economy. The increasing intensity of this tension is traced through key reforming texts, until later English visitations open up religious houses to closer scrutiny, ironically aided by inmates' quandary over whether to conceal or reveal their secrets.
The mother tongue at school
(2023)
This paper focuses on a key contradiction in nineteenth century nationalist ideology, namely the opposition between the emphasis on the sacred status of the mother tongue, on the one hand, and the use of universal mandatory schooling as a means of homogenization, on the other. The influential philologist Jacob Grimm insisted that only people whose mother tongue was German counted as members of the German nation; the mother tongue was the key criterion of authentic belonging. Yet Grimm also realized that mandatory schooling imposed a uniform language across a wide territory, wiping out local dialects and effectively giving shape to a more linguistically unified people. He thus witnessed how modern mass instruction forged a more standardized culture at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language within families. In Grimm's writings on education, the valorization of the mother is continually disturbed by the presence of a surrogate figure, the school teacher.
This article reads Albert Cohen's "Le Livre de ma mère", which mourns the death of his mother, as a poetics of love and loss. It is a poetics of otherness that disavows the claim to expression and selfhood. The mother, being the paradigmatic figure of otherness, is a figure for literature, a form of language that is characterized by saying things differently. Literature itself is a motherly space insofar as it others the language of the self. This argument is developed along close readings of both the French original and the English translation of Cohen's work, following three thematic axes: first, the peculiar kinship of love and death; second, the mother as the other; third, literature as filio-logy: a logic of filiation that does not leave the self unchanged.
This paper deals with the general topic of subjectivity and subjectivation, considered through a philosophical tradition opposed to the 'philosophies of consciousness': that is, a philosophical tradition, from Spinoza to Althusser, that rejects as a myth the supposed primacy and presocial character of subjective identity.
This article draws on the nearly 1800 letters which survive from the Benedictine convent of Lüne, near Lüneburg in northern Germany, and were written between c. 1460 and 1555. It explores the textual and visual strategies which nuns in the later Middle Ages used to negotiate their enclosed status. It suggests that the language and imagery of openness were a means for the nuns to remind those outside the convent wall of their presence and purpose in life.
This paper begins with a Bakhtinian reflection on Javanese shadow puppet theatre (wayang kulit), and explores errancy through carnival laughter embodied and performed by the wise, grotesque figures of clown-servants (punakawan). I argue, however, that here the real subversive power lies not in a combative position that erupts in a social revolution but in offering an alternative way of thinking and being, a deviation from the philosophical (Platonic) obsession for truth and heroic/historic gestures that claim to overcome ignorance and hegemonic/normative structures. Responding to the critique of so-called feudal elements in 'Javanism', I explore how the Javanese mantra, 'manunggaling kawula gusti' (the union of servant and lord), incessantly rehearsed in the stories and life of the people, reveals neither blindness nor self-dissimulation.
The reactivation of time
(2022)
Reappropriating, restaging, revisioning, remediating: at the crossroad of the new millennium, reenactment has undoubtedly emerged as a key issue in the field of artistic production, in theoretical discourse, and in the socio-political sphere. Taking an ever larger distance from notions of historical revival and 'Living History', current reenactments call into question whether the present can unpack, embody, or disentangle the past. Accordingly, to reenact is to experience the past by reactivating either a particular cultural heritage or unexplored utopias. If to reenact means not to restore but to challenge the past, history is thus turned into a possible and perpetual becoming, a site for invention and renewal.
The essay engages with a screenplay by Michel Foucault, written in 1970 for a film, not realized during Foucault's lifetime, about Pablo Picasso's "Las Meninas", a series of 58 paintings that the artist made in 1957, taking up, updating, reinterpreting the famous painting with the same title by Diego Velázquez (1656). This screenplay is at the same time an example of critical reflection on reenactment in art history and itself a reenactment practice of sorts: the filmic repetition of an artistic repetition. It invites a reflection on the role of repetition as a critical operation: how doubles, reenacted images, and 'countermimesis' can become creative gestures and opening movements of transformation through plays of refraction, duplication, and multiplication of the realities and subjectivities at stake in them.
The essay focusses on how Woolf's quest for a 'universal' language of the mind can be read as redefining and even reinventing the notion of mother tongue. In particular, "The Waves" offers a reconfiguration of the process of language acquisition that symbolically reverses its linear development. Woolf's stress on a dynamic, ever-moving conception of language, her connection with Coleridge's perspectives on language, and her view of ancient Greek as an ideal lost language reveal her questioning of the idea of a culturally homogeneous and monolithic language. The notion of mother tongue is thus reconfigured by the writer in terms of a dreamed and imagined ideal language combining familiarity and foreignness, reality and ideality, exactness and the perpetual deferral of meaning.
'The Staircase Wit; or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller's Prose' explores idioms and 'Sprachbilder' as poetic views of the mother tongue. This exploration involves a special focus on Müller's Nobel lecture, considered as both a compendium and an enactment of her meditations on language, on the nature of writing, and on the creative process. While Müller frequently employs idioms in her articles, lectures, and novel titles, she never uses them in a superficial way or as a mere reproduction of common or daily speech. Rather, as this essay argues, idioms in Müller's prose are indicative of her attitude toward language and toward the mother tongue in general. In the Nobel lecture as well as elsewhere, idioms serve a dual, occasionally conflicting purpose, combining the need for the 'singularity' of aesthetic experience with the search for a new kind of 'conventionality'.
Writing a positive account of utopias has always been a difficult and risky task. Utopias have always already been out of fashion and outside of time. Since 1989 at the latest, visions of utopia appear to have come to an end. Twenty years after Fukayama's 'end of history', this article re-assesses the potentially fruitful roles for utopia’s out-of-timeness. Focusing on the critical potential of utopias through the concept of tension, it argues that utopian thought must be conceptualized through its tensile connections both to the status quo of a given society and to its possible futures.