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The article offers a philosophical reading of Mazen Kerbaj's sound piece "Starry Night". Recorded in 2006 during the bombing of Beirut by the Israeli Air Force, the piece stages an acoustic encounter between the improvised sounds of the trumpet and live bomb explosions. Arguing for a formal examination of the ways in which Kerbaj stages the problem of the genesis of musical order in the exchange between trumpet and bombs, the article draws parallels with explorations of the problems of the State and of political contradiction in the Marxist tradition. Three common points are identified: the contingency of the appearance of order, its inseparability from an excess of violence, and its spatializing function. The last part delineates parallels between Kerbaj's subversive aesthetic strategies and Badiou's elaboration of the concept of the subject as the interruption of a repetitive logic of placement.
The essay confronts the question of weathering by considering its excess to the conceptual dimension and relating it to what Jacques Derrida names (the) 'trace'. The study of the 'logic' of weathering/the trace is confronted with Giorgio Agamben's critique of Derrida's project. Their two different conceptions of language, of its presuppositional structure, and of its order of 'metaphysical presence' are considered, in particular by turning to Werner Hamacher's work on these and related matters.
The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the 'world' in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around 'world literature' have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge's theory of how literature 'works', the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of 'the work of world literature'. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
Opponents of World Literature fear that its advent marks the end of the 'work of literature'. J. M. Coetzee's "The Childhood of Jesus" (2013) presents a world in which the work of literature has indeed been forgotten. Migrants arrive in a new life 'washed clean' of the burden of the European tradition. Simón, who dimly recalls the old life, feels that something is missing in the new. He longs for something altogether 'other'. Might Simón learn from the exceptional child David to perceive the 'likeness' in this world? Are we to read Coetzee's novel like Simón or like David - and with what consequence for our understanding of the work of literature in a time of World Literature?
Ruth Preser's essay 'Things I Learned from the "Book of Ruth": Diasporic Reading of Queer Conversions' performs a queer appropriation of history. The "Book of Ruth" is a biblical narrative that opens with two women, Naomi the Israelite, a bereaved woman who wishes to return from Moab to Judea, and her no-longer-daughter-in-law Ruth the Moabite, who pledges to follow Naomi, turning away from her gods and people. This laconic tale of nomadic intimacies and speech-acts of pledges and conversions has become an iconic narrative and a seminal text in Judaism, and it has also been appropriated by contemporary feminist and lesbian readings. Indeed, since it is not fully narrated but rather full of gaps, voids, and 'ghostly matters', the "Book of Ruth" provides apt ground and a malleable vessel for contemporary appropriation by stories seeking incarnation beyond linear or teleological constraints. In Preser's 'palimpsest reading', the biblical tale continues to communicate a story of successful assimilation of the poor and the foreign, and of a 'home-coming', but it is troubled by displacement, unresolved diasporic longing, and an acute and continuous sense of vulnerability. Thinking with Avery Gordon's modality of haunting, Preser's reading aims to understand contemporary forms of dispossession and their impact, especially when their oppressive nature is denied. It reflects on what kind of theory might emerge by remobilizing the category of 'home' through its de-constitution, through movement rather than destination, through disintegration rather than determination. Troubled by questions of race, nomadism, gender, and sexuality, in an era when (some) bodies may traverse national, sexual, and class borders, Preser's investigation asks what happens to bodies that continuously signify precarity and loss.
During fieldwork, anthropologists are given many names that point to their intersectional placement regarding race, class, gender, nationality, and religion. Yet, careful consideration of vernacular forms of designation reveals that such generalizing categories do not always reflect the ways in which people are named and positioned in a given context. While acknowledging the relevance of intersectionality, this paper discusses the relationship between naming and social positionality through a comparative consideration of names employed to designate Dulley in Angola and Santos in Senegal. It explores how these designators, ascribed to the researchers by their interlocutors, contextually identify their positionality. Through concrete examples, it shows how this process of emplacement can both enable and restrict one's possibilities of action and experience.
What if one thinks not in terms of shared meanings or contents, but rather in terms of iterable gestures available for reenactment in different times and places in order to conceive of a cross-cultural world of literature? This essay sets out to explore, within the discursive mode of the lyric, whether the notion of gesture could be more helpful than meaning-based translation to account for the transferability of literary texts and for envisioning a form of community based on the shareability of certain gestures. To do so, it will look at how the act-event of reading described by Derek Attridge is processed in two cases in which poems are transferred from an earlier authoritative tradition into a new one.
In December 1960 the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York displayed a series of thirty-four illustrations of the "Inferno" by the avant-garde artist Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg had developed this project over the previous two years, working on it almost exclusively, first in New York City, and then in an isolated storage room in Treasure Island, Florida, where he retreated to concentrate on the last half of the cycle. [...] Whatever the spark that set the project in motion, we find Rauschenberg's reply to his detractors here: the refuse that crowded his "Combines" was no joke, nor was it there to undermine or deride high art in the spirit of Dada. With his collection of things, he was composing a new language, turning fragments - the ruins of his environment and culture - into emblems. And what is an emblem if not a composite figure, an assemblage of diverse fragments into a new unity and order? As such, it is an elusive visual allegory whose pictorial image tends to lose its consistency and become a sign open to interpretations; in it, the different narratives springing from its multiple nature come together and give birth to a polysemic language. It is with this language, abstract and referential at the same time, that Rauschenberg translates Dante's poem and makes it new by linking it to something in existence, present in the viewer’s reality of mechanically reproduced images. By choosing 'to ennoble the ordinary', he, perhaps unconsciously, became the hermeneutist of his age and gave durability to what was trivial and precarious.
"Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories" presents a unique form of creative scholarship. It employs Dante's late medieval take on Ulysses and his tragic pursuit of 'virtue and knowledge' as a prism that refracts an ancient myth of journey and return into a modern story of discovery and nostalgia. Working notes, fragments from Ulysses' many stories, personal memories, illuminations, and rewritings combine to form a new chain of narratives about the desire to create, the art of travelling, and the will of self-reinvention.
UNFOLD : the strategic importance of reinterpretation for media art mediation and conservation
(2022)
UNFOLD: Mediation by Reinterpretation is a research project and interdisciplinary network initiated by LIMA, Platform for Media Art in Amsterdam, that examines reinterpretation as an emerging practice for artistic production, presentation, and preservation of media works. New elements stretch the boundaries of traditional preservation methods and require insights from both the artist and the curator to decide how pieces can be restaged. This essay investigates how to deal with the changes of digital/media artworks over time, and how to preserve and mediate their performative aspects.
To support the practice of preservation and mediation of video works in the LIMA Collection (Amsterdam), the authors explore the possibilities of reinterpretation as a rather common practice in the performing arts. As a choreographer and a dramaturge, they establish a correlation between reinterpretation and dramaturgy - as a way to deal with non-objective or transitory aspects of the works - and describe their method in relation to the video and performance artist Nan Hoover.
What is the relationship between reenactment and repetition compulsion? By shedding light upon the different levels of reenactment at stake in "Yella" by Christian Petzold, I analyse the 'transitional spaces' where the German filmmaker places his wandering characters who have 'slipped out of history'. In "Yella" Petzold mixes up past, present, future, and oneiric re-elaboration to question the memory of the past of GDR, which in his view has never really been constituted as history. The characters that populate this movie move in a setting constructed at the crossroad between a protected environment where the reenacted events are sheltered by the time and the space of the plot and a place weathered by the unpredictable atmospheric agents of the present. How and to which extent can the clash between different temporalities produce a minimal variation?
In "The Book of Margery Kempe", the protagonist shifts between identities and geographies as a nomadic subject, dispersed across compassionate responses to violence that unusually include a recognition of animal suffering. The "Life" of Christina the Astonishing also seizes on the nonhuman aspects of extreme affective experience as her bodily transformations participate in a process of becoming animal. Both texts reflect a medieval fascination with the devotional body as a zone of closure and opening where transhuman and interspecies associations can be safely explored.
What are called 'natural languages' are artificial, often politically instituted and regulated, phenomena; a more accurate picture of speech practices around the globe is of a multidimensional continuum. This essay asks what the implications of this understanding of language are for translation, and focuses on the variety of Afrikaans known as Kaaps, which has traditionally been treated as a dialect rather than a language in its own right. An analysis of a poem in Kaaps by Nathan Trantraal reveals the challenges such a use of language constitutes for translation. A revised understanding of translation is proposed, relying less on the notion of transfer of meaning from one language to another and more on an active engagement with the experience of the reader.
"Untying the Mother Tongue" explores what it might mean today to speak of someone's attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of 'mother tongue', rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions.
Aumiller writes lists to externalize what overwhelms her. To be in control. To master and move on. Yet, her lists circle back to her. The process of writing the same list every day or the same act of writing the list is a looping. She returns to herself, to the parts she can remember and to the parts she can't remember, but also can't leave behind.
In this paper, I will address the issue of translation as a critique of autochthony that emerges in the context of Fritz Mauthner's linguistic scepticism. Translation, for Mauthner, becomes a privileged prism through which to consider identity and belonging, as well as a way of understanding uprootedness, since language is a continuous product of borrowing, bastardization, stratification, and contingency. According to Mauthner, languages are not possession, but borrowing; not purity, but contagion; not an abstract crystallization, but transit. Therefore, love of the mother tongue - the only way to conceive patriotism - is not a physical connection with the land, roots, or nation, but a refuge, an always precarious 'Heimat' (home).
Umut Yıldırım's introduction combines the genres of literature review and commentary. It re-examines contemporary works on posthuman life to articulate ecological life-and-death politics within the context of colonial, imperial, and genocidal mass violence, and their entangled environmental legacies and actualities. A dissident repertoire of anthropological and artistic research is offered, which examines the ecological impact of war through the perspectives of human and more-than-human actors whose racialized and geographically regimented lives endure and counter ongoing environmental destruction.
"War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East" identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East. It creates a counter archive of texts by ethnographers and artists, and enables divergent worlds to share a conversation through the crevices of mass violence across species. Delving into vital encounters with mulberry trees, wild medicinal plants, jinns, and goats, as well as bleaker experiences with toxic war materials like landmines, this volume expands an ecological sensorium that works through displacement, memory, endurance, and praxis.
Filippo Trentin's essay 'Warburg's Ghost: On Literary Atlases and the "Anatopic" Shift of a Cartographic Object' analyses the atlas as a method of assemblage in literary theory. It takes issue with the use of cartography advocated by proponents of a 'spatial turn' within literary studies, including Malcolm Bradbury's "Atlas of Literature", Franco Moretti's "Atlas of European Literature", and Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà's "Atlante della letteratura italiana". While these atlases claim to dismantle the normative canon of historicism and to offer a different way of gathering knowledge, Trentin argues that they often risk reproducing analogous positivistic, hierarchical, and colonizing assumptions. Showing a totalizing attitude embedded in modern atlases and in the 'cartographic reason' emerging from the sixteenth century onwards, the essay proposes a speculative and heuristic use of the term 'anatopy' that aims to capture the disorienting potentialities that are intrinsic to non-cartographic explorations of space. In particular, it interprets Aby Warburg's "Bilderatlas Mnemosyne" as an 'anatopic' object that keeps troubling any purely cartographic use of the atlas. In Trentin's reading, by theorizing an anti-foundational (and anti-identitarian) method of knowledge organization based on the morphological affect between disparate images and objects, Warburg's project leads to the profanation of the atlas as a topographical machine and, with its recurrences, intervals, and voids, destitutes its traditional apparatus of power. This disparate and anti-holistic aesthetic disposition challenges the solid foundations of the constructions of historicism and cartographic reason. It breaks up the technical explanation of cause and effect and substitutes it with a 'danced causality', which Trentin relates to Leo Bersani's idea of 'aesthetic subject' and the possibility of moving beyond an immobile and filial principle of identity formation towards a virtual and impersonal one that is located beyond the 'ego', as well as beyond the rigid borders of cartographic reason and the linearity of positivistic historicism.