Birgit Mara Kaiser

Diffraction: Onto-Epistemology, Quantum Physics and the Critical Humanities

In critical cultural analysis, the metaphor of ‘diffraction’ surfaced in 1992 with Donna Haraway’s ‘The Promises ofMonsters’ as a feminist tool to rethink difference/s beyond binary opposition/s. Drawing on physical optics, where it describes the interference pattern of diffracting light rays, Haraway adopted diffraction to move our images of difference/s from oppositional to differential, from static to productive, and our ideas of scientific knowledge from reflective, disinterested judgment to mattering, embedded involvement. It is an ‘invented category of semantics’ that builds on and contests metaphors we habitually use to describe practices of knowing and living.

Worlding CompLit: Diffractive Reading with Barad, Glissant and Nancy

In current debates about the future of Comparative Literature, the term ‘World Literature’ has seen a remarkable revival. It is one of the responses given to the challenges that the field undeniably faces, as literatures from other than European contexts become more and more visible and important for study. With a postWorld-War-II heritage that rested upon a limited number of European literary traditions and languages and that quite self-evidently equated those languages with nations as they were established in Europe in the nineteenth century, Comparative Literature finds its basic framework of analysis contested. The immense wealth of languages and literary traditions – perhaps first put on the radar of US and European debates of Comparative Literature by such ‘specific’ areas of study as postcolonial or transnational literary studies – is of fundamental relevance to the field as it struggles to adjust to the evidences and challenges of a ‘world-wide’ poetic production and creative intra-action. In the past decade, the proposals for reorienting the field in response to this have been manifold, among them the mentioned renaissance of a Goethian view of literatures beyond national confines as World Literature. Other propositions have been to acknowledge the death of Comparative Literature as we know it and stress planetarity as its viable future, securing linguistic proficiency through cooperation with Area Studies (Spivak); or its transformation toward a ‘new comparative literature’ which takes global translatio and untranslatability as its crucial angle of analysis, a position recently pronounced explicitly against an understanding of World Literature that too easily presumes translatability and overlooks the intimate binds of literature to the languages in which it comes (Apter).

Two Floors of Thinking: Deleuze’s Aesthetics of Folds

In order to pose the question of how we have to imagine a Deleuzian aesthetics adequately, we need to do more than assemble the writers, painters, film-makers, composers, and musicians his texts frequently refer to and to whose works many of Deleuze’s concepts are intimately linked—if we think, for example, of Kafka’s minor peoples, Kleist’s war-machine, or Bacon’s sensations. We can also not contend ourselves with pointing out Deleuze’s preferences for certain periods or styles, such as the baroque or Modern art. We will find that, in order to pose the question adequately, we will have to begin to reconsider what is usually referred to as aesthetics and its allegedly inherent relation to art. Approaching this question in his essay “Existe-t-il une esthetique deleuzienne?” (1998), Jacques Ranciere begins with such a move. He reconsiders our understanding of aesthetics by dismissing the widely held view of it, according to which aesthetics—baptized as a discipline by Alexander G. Baumgarten in the mid-eighteenth century, and formed throughout the nineteenth century in the wake of such major influences as Kant’s First and Third Critiques, Schelling’s idealist philosophy of art and Hegel’s history of aesthetics—is generally understood and undertaken as a philosophizing on art and on the subjective experiences of the pleasure and displeasure art evokes.

Other Headings: Ben Jelloun, Derrida, Sansal and the Critique of Europe

This essay diffracts the question of the heading of Europe that Derrida asked in 1990. We do so through the prism of harraga presented in Tahar Ben Jellouns Leaving Tangiers and Boualem Sansals Harraga. Although Europe as the capital has been ‘de-identified’ (Derrida 1992, 75) in the wake of decolonization and postcolonial critique, it still has to be de-identified always anew. Something has been promised in its name and is, we suggest, currently most forcefully reclaimed by people who ‘burn up the road’. Listening to these claims is vital for any future ‘Europe’ because the responses currently presented by ‘Europe’ are still either self-identification and closure or aversion from Europe altogether. With reference to Derrida, this essay insists on the necessity to take note of and affirm that Europe must ‘open itself onto the other shore of another heading’. Derrida was hopeful (‘that is already at work anyway’), underneath and alongside the closure of borders since the early 1990s and the increase in clandestine migration. Although we see mainly symptoms of radical closure, with Derrida and the harragas this essay asserts it can be otherwise – that it is Europes brutal failure to ignore this call of the heading of the others, forestalling any chance for an ‘other of the heading’. It is thus ‘Europes’ duty to listen to the (re)call of these others.

Introduction: Navigating Differential Futures, (Un)making Colonial Pasts

In the fifteen years that have followed Robert Young’s seminal rereading of the epistemic and physical violence of colonialism as a desiring-machine’s production, coding and re/deterritorialization of colonial desire, drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to ‘think through’ (Young 1995, p. 173) postcoloniality, few have followed Young’s lead and ventured into the difficult domain of Deleuze and the postcolonial. Christopher Miller’s application of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad and rhizome as conceptual tools for theorizing the (post)identity politics of postcolonialism has perhaps come closest to setting the parameters of a Deleuzian postcolonial analysis: today both nomadology and rhizomatic thought continue to find privileged resonance with the work of postcolonial theorists and critics (cf. Glissant 1997; Huggan 2008, pp. 28–30; Miller 1998). Without denying the relevance of these terms to postcolonial studies, this volume promotes a more fundamental alignment of the fields of Deleuzian thought and postcolonialism. In doing so, it forms part of a growing awareness within postcolonial studies of the critical potential of this dialogue, as evidenced by the recent work of Simone Bignall and Paul Patton — in both their co-edited volume Deleuze and the Postcolonial (2010) and their individual works Deleuzian Concepts (Patton 2010), and Postcolonial Agency (Bignall 2010) — as well as by the work of contemporary literary scholars including Mrinalini Greedharry (2008), Ronald Bogue (2010), Eva Aldea (2011), and, of course, as we shall see, Peter Hallward in his Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (2001).

What is Species Memory? Or, Humanism, Memory and the Afterlives of “1492”’

Are we on the same page here? Because we too are also now struggling to move beyond the knee-jerk limits of the Us and the Them.1One key historical ‘site of memory’ in which the Jamaican novelist, ...