Bryan Reynolds

Civilizing Subjects, or Not: Montaigne’s Guide to Modernity, Agamben’s Exception, and Human Rights after Derrida

We would have subtitled this chapter, “Montaigne’s Guide to Modernity, Foucault’s Biopower, Agamben’s Exception, Ranciere’s Dissensus, Boltanski’s Multiplicities, and Human Rights after Arendt, Habermas, and Derrida,” but we are not so expansive as to lose all concern for style or credibility. And yet, it is the desire to involve ourselves in the conversation with all these discourses on power, individuals, and politics that drives our analysis of two early modern texts on civilizing subjects: Simon Marion’s virtually unknown Pleas by Mister Simon Marion, lawyer of the Parliament …,(1587), compared to Michel de Montaigne’s extremely well-known “Of Cannibals” (Bordeaux 1580; Paris 1588, etc.). We take Marion’s plea to represent widespread consensus (were it otherwise, it would not have worked in support of his legal argument), while Montaigne’s text may well represent a possibly less widespread position at the time, and its popularity today is due to the fact that it appears uncannily to anticipate twentieth-century anthropological relativism. Epic frescoes start in medias res, and we begin ours at midpoint between 1587 and the present, in 1789, not because of any wish to create suspense, but quite the opposite, to cleave as closely as possible to the common ground of the twentieth-and twenty-first century texts we evoke.

“A little touch of Harry in the night”: Translucency and Projective Transversality in the Sexual and National Politics of Henry V

The multiple roles of Henry V have become a critical commonplace, whether he is viewed positively or negatively as savvy prince or as calculating politician. The specific interrelation of the roles and the mechanisms of their production have been less attended to, and are, because of their paradoxical interfaces, particularly inviting of a transversal analysis. In employing “transversal theory” for this purpose, we find that the play foregrounds a mechanism we call the “principal of translucency,” by which one signifier or identity is incompletely concealed within another, a disguise apparently flawed or inadequate, producing a particular kind of mixed coding for audiences or spectators, who experience transversality in response.1 While historically nonspecific as both a social and theatrical trope, this principle of translucency is specifically historical as a feature of early modern social performativity theorized in terms of courtly spectacle by Baldessare Castiglione. It is a visual means whereby transversal territory may be open for wonder, whereby the subjective dislocations of transversality may be approximated visually for an audience’s understanding and enticement. Shakespeare, as we hope to demonstrate, illustrates an employment of transversality onstage and offstage, including what we call a “projective transversality,” by which one effects, or attempts to affect, transversality in the other rather than in oneself.

The Making of Authorships

Manhattan, July 7, 1995: On this hot, muggy evening, an audience rapidly filled Lincoln Centers air-conditioned Alice Tully Hall. Whereas the majority probably hailed from New York City and its nearby environs, one member of the audience had driven down from Cambridge and another had flown in from San Diego just to see this particular performance of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. At the time, these two, the authors of this paper, did not know each other.

Venetian Ideology or Transversal Power? Iago’s Motives and the Means by which Othello Falls

This chapter presents a new perspective on the means by which Othello falls from his position of high status both within Venetian society and in the eyes of the play’s audience. By examining the pertinent critical history of Othello, especially criticism accounting for the effects on Othello of lago’s machinations, this analysis explores the social and ideological relations between Iago and Othello through the lenses of several different critical approaches, including new historicist and cultural materialist. Our aim is to reveal the contradictions and limitations in this critical history that encourage an examination of the play according to a more inclusive approach that we call “transversal theory,” which will be explained as the analysis progresses.1 In doing this, we hope to emancipate the critical history of Othello from the delimiting analytical parameters that have characterized it, and to show the transversal ways in which Iago paradoxically opposes and reifies Venetian state ideology.

Inspriteful Ariels: Transversal Tempests

The Tempest has been a homage to art, an autobiographical farewell to theater, a colonialist celebration of English expansion, an exhortation on early modern (mis)understandings of racial differences, and an expression of patriarchal power, to name just some of the diverse interpretations that have marked its progress through “Shakespace.”1 Debates over the play’s meaning have spanned topics ranging from geographical determinations to identifying various characters as humans, symbols, or monsters.2 Consistent with the play’s hermeneutic history is the now popular assertion that the play in fact invites conflicting responses. Defending and complicating new historicist readings of the play, for example, Paul Brown reads The Tempest as an “ambivalent text,” which struggles “to produce a coherent discourse adequate to the complex requirements of British colonialism in its initial phase.”3 Stephen Orgel has also championed the notion of the text’s inherent ambivalence. Declaring, “Historically, there has been a consistent tendency to ignore [the play’s] ambivalences, sweeten and sentimentalize it,” Orgel goes on to use the terms “ambivalent” and “ambiguous” no fewer than fifteen times to describe the play.4 Mixed meanings have come to characterize The Tempest’s ideological coordinates, for which it serves as a magnetic sociopolitical conductor, attracting its opposites and propelling those with strong similarities into perhaps more confusing territories. The difficult task at hand is how to assess the influential power and directional inclination of its ambivalent forces, forces that neither necessarily subvert “coherent discourse” nor necessarily lead to indeterminacy.

Untimely Ripped: Mediating Witchcraft in Polanski and Shakespeare

Shortly after midnight on August 9, 1969, as instructed by cult leader Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, Katie Krenwinkel, and Charles Watson unlawfully entered the Hollywood Hills estate of director Roman Polanski and his movie star wife, Sharon Tate. To promote “Helier Skelter,” a horrific dream scheme designed by Manson to effect ultimately a worldwide racial war ending in a white elite ruling over a black population, the four Manson family members set out to rob and brutally murder the inhabitants of the Polanski residence. Steven Parent, a friend of the estate’s caretaker, was the first to die. As Parent attempted to leave the property in his car, he was suddenly, and in short order, shot, stabbed, and killed by Watson. Then, while Kasabian kept a lookout for people coming at the end of the driveway, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Watson invaded the house, forced its occupants at knife-point into the living room, tied them together with nylon rope by their necks, and began stabbing and shooting them to death. One hundred and two stab wounds scattered the mangled corpses of Abigail Folger, Voityck Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant with her and Roman’s first child. When the assassins completed their mission, they returned to Manson who was waiting for them at a bar.

Aspects of Intermediality: Objective Agency, Wonderment, and Transversal Refractions from the Age of Shakespeare

omething that every theater-maker knows is that objects perform. Or, they are made to perform. Performance theorists and theater semioticians have a term for this, “ostention.

Transversal Affectivity and the Lobster: Intimate Advances of Deleuze and Guattari, Rodrigo García and La Carnicería Teatro, Jan Lauwers and Needcompany, and Alice in Wonderland

When we buy lobsters from grocers, or have them flown in by FedEx from Maine, or when we choose them from the tank at the seafood restaurant, where they crawl around on top of each other, antennae slowly waving, we experience a distinct and oddly excited perplexity. We might arrive at home with the lobsters in a paper bag or box, still alive, claws softly scraping the paper or cardboard—horror-film like—with the slow but persistent motions lobsters make while living. We take the lobsters out and, claws safely held together with rubber bands, place them on the table or perhaps the floor.

Noodling the Nodals, Nodal Hamlet: Difference and Repetition, Extreme Performances, Remembering to Forget

To fugitively explore is to track irresistible and elusive subject matters, to journey the undercurrents of semiotic streams, not in the interest of absolute capture, but to balance on a nodal of understanding, where affective forces significantly meet, until we move off. Afterwards the noodling resumes, and we improvise on the memories generated, negotiate past, present, and future, navigate repetitions and differences, until we find ourselves lingering felicitously on the indeterminate edge, rushing nowhere in the capricious winds of inevitable change, we go. And along with us go the traces of our journeys, reverberating with the streams of our performances.

Introduction: Formal Matters

The becomings- and comings-to-be-other, together, and through intermedial theater, force-multiplied by its indeterminate structural propensities for affective emergences that exceed the artistic designs of the theatric-media processes themselves, stimulate cascades of feedback-loops givings-way to feedforward-flows goings-elsewhere wondrously achieving transversality over the rainbow of compossibility.