Gert Buelens

Above and Beneath Classification: Bartleby, Life and Times of Michael K, and Syntagmatic Participation

the history of the relation between the law, norm, or rule on the one hand and what forms an exception to that rule on the other is complex and multifaceted.1 in the most general terms, one could posit that the exception is that which escapes from the rule. thus, confronted with the strangeness of michael K, his noncommunicativeness, his odd combination of meekness and intransigence, the medical officer in J. M. Coetzee’s life and times of michael K assigns K a place “above and beneath classification” [Coetzee 151]. Michael K is at once too large and too small to fit into the administrative and humanitarian categories that pertain at the prisoner camp. he appears to the medical officer—whose good intentions and patient, selfless interest in K cannot be doubted—as a recalcitrant, nonidentifiable object that flirts with dehumanization. To put it in Bataille’s terms, michael K is formless (informe), and his existence can, by mere virtue of that fact, be called scandalous.2 Let us take a closer look at the expression “above and beneath classification.” We can note that (1) it names something that situates itself on the outside of any classification; (2) this something must have a paradoxical status, since it is at once above and beneath classification; (3) the nonclassifiable is regarded as such from a classifying perspective. Although the latter point may sound tautological, it nonetheless touches upon one of the most difficult dimensions of the exception: if the exception is always an exception to the rule, how can it exist otherwise than by virtue of that rule? how can it be more than just the rule’s negative? But if the exception radically breaks away from the rule, then how is it possible for that rule to identify the exception and recognize it as such? This crucial problem has formed the basis for reflection on the relation between rule and exception. freud, for instance, saw the exception (crime) as constitutive of social ties and the social order. lacan needed a special topology to show the extimate character of what is at once inside and outside the symbolic order [Lacan, Miller]. Religious ways of thinking could be said to have located the exception as transcendent to any human order. for badiou, the secularization of the infinite cannot be thought apart from an immanent, rather than transcendent, event that is disruptive of all order. In Derrida’s subtle analyses, the originary supplement appears as both constitutive and deconstructive. Agamben regards the exception as having become the political rule. these interpretative frameworks, in spite of some deep distinctions, all show not only that the rule cannot do without the exception, but that the exception is just as dependent on the rule. Even when the exception is regarded as a kind of pure, ruleless being-as-such, the rule is at the very least conceptually

Imagining Telegraphic Joy in the Canny Cage of Metaphor, Metonymy, and Performativity

The aim of this essay is to explore some of the strengths and limitations of current uses of the rhetorical pair metaphor-metonymy, introduced by structuralism as a fundamental bifurcation. The essay examines whether one version of a new formalism based on Judith Butlers work can reconstitute a tropological plan that offers a better roadmap to the (performative) siting of the subject and of its relations with others as they emerge in the Jamesian text.

Introduction Authorship as Cultural Performance: New Perspectives in Authorship Studies

Abstract This article proposes a performative model of authorship, based on the historical alternation between predominantly ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ author concepts and related practices of writing, publication and reading. Based on this model, we give a brief overview of the historical development of such author concepts in English literature from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. We argue for a more holistic approach to authorship within a cultural topography, comprising social contexts, technological and media factors, and other cultural developments, such as the distinction between privacy and the public sphere.

Non-Readings and Misreadings of "The Jamesian Lie"

Leo Bersani’s “The Jamesian Lie” has had less of an impact than it deserves. It has often been ignored or misread. For Sharon Cameron, Bersani critiques how consciousness “betrays the social order” in James; in fact, Bersani shows how betrayal is the index of a notion of truth against which his work does battle. In “The Beast in the Closet” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pulls away from a surface-level secret (“the secret of having a secret”) to the depth of underlying causes (“the closet of imagining a homosexual secret”). “Truth” here denies the reality of the lie that only Bersani has recognized as a productive rather than privative force in James.

“Confounding Closed Systems”: Transforming the Boundaries of Jewish Identity in Rebecca Goldstein's Novel Mazel

In contemporary Jewish American fiction, the themes of immigration and resettlement take on a renewed significance. In various short stories and novels, a threefold composition—(pre-war) life in Europe, the transatlantic journey and settlement in America—serves as a starting point for the contemplation of post-war Jewish American identity. Rebecca Goldsteins novel Mazel is an excellent example of this. The novel reconstructs the lives of three generations of women in a setting that covers both pre-war Europe and post-war suburban America. It portrays the complex mother-daughter relationships and depicts the different worlds that each woman inhabits—worlds that are unknown to the others. But this novel also deals with the notions of origin, belonging and not belonging, the possible continuity of tradition, and different definitions of Jewish identity. This essay suggests that Goldstein portrays a constant struggle with ethnic or communal identity—a struggle or tension structured around inclusiveness and exclusiveness—that results in a broadening of the concept of Jewish identity. The novel attains this by challenging and undermining fixed or predetermined ideas and dichotomies (man/woman, shtetl/outside world, tradition/modernity, Europe/America, past/present, descent/consent). Instead, Mazel eventually offers the idea of a more hybrid and flexible definition of Jewish identity that favours the fusion of a strong communal identity with the possibility of multiple affiliations. These ideas are specifically rendered through the character of Fraydel, the sister of one of the main protagonists.

notproud.com. Giving an account of oneself in the cyber-era

This essay will argue that the theory of confession, even in its most recent elaboration by Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself, is in need of substantial revision, as the current understanding of confession as an address to the other cannot account for the new kinds of confession that are proliferating on the internet. Focusing on the website notproud.com, where both the penitent and the addressee remain anonymous, we show that the existing understanding of confession as a contract between a sinner and an other (Foucault, Lévinas, Butler) cannot hold. The purpose of the anonymous online confession cannot be easily understood as an ethical relationship between self and other, and is not undertaken for the purposes of absolution, or at least not in straightforward ways. This new turn in the practice and the purpose of confession therefore requires a new theoretical paradigm, a fact that may have far-reaching consequences for ethical models derived from Lévinas, and for wider models of intersubjective relations. We will argue that Butler’s theory offers a promising basis for such a new paradigm, and we will indicate some of the adjustments that will be needed. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler turns to an issue that she had occasionally addressed in previous writings: to what extent is it Textual Practice 22(4), 2008, 757–774