Henry Sussman

Deterritorializing the Text: Flow-Theory and Deconstruction

God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata come at least in pairs, but in a different way each tratum is double (it itself has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of double articulation. Articulate twice, B-A, BA. . . . Double articulation is so extremely variable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units (substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms). The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures (forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which these tructur are simultaneously actualized (substances). (TP, 40-41)1

High resolution : critical theory and the problem of literacy

At the heart of this important new book is the tension between literacy and the open acknowledgement of discrepancies within social and linguistic fields on the one hand, and what Sussman terms the resolving function, the utopian picture of harmony depicted by the state and large organizations, on the other. Combining literary theory with close textual readings of works by Hawthorne, Melville, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Italo Calvino, this book is the first to explore the socio-political correlatives to literary studies - the mass medias ambivalence towards the linguistic apprehensions and skills that make them possible.

The Phenomenology of Jetlag

A common experience, resulting in a common confusion. A. has to transact important business with B. in H. He goes to H. for a preliminary interview, accomplishes the journey there in ten minutes and the journey back in the same time, and on returning boasts to his family of his expedition. Next day he goes again to H., this time to settle his business finally. As that by all appearances will require several hours, A. leaves very early in the morning. But although all the surrounding circumstances, at least in A.’s estimation, are exactly the same as the day before, this time it takes him ten hours to reach H. When he arrives there quite exhausted in the evening he is informed that B., annoyed at his absence, had left an hour before to go to A.’s village and that they must have passed each other on the road.

Pulsations of Respect, or Winged Impossibility: Literature with Deconstruction

This tribute to Jacques Derrida takes in the sweep of his orchestration of literature with philosophy, as two “counterposed moments” of his interrogation of the working of language and thought. Focusing especially on his reading of Mallarmé, which distills the philosophical resonance of discourse that identifies itself as literary, and on Specters of Marx, which displays the political resonance of deconstruction, Sussman also turns to Derridas reading of Blanchot as a figure who resumes the tension between the literary and the philosophical but who “inscribes life, in all its impossible conditions.”

Berlin Childhood around 1900 (review)

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies of “knowledge” and conscience, intensified over the centuries after Lessing and Kant (pp. 70–72). His close readings of Adolf von Harnack’s position for the Christian side and Leo Baeck’s position for the Jewish side are introduced by the thesis that both in their own ways fail to recognize and to do justice to their respective other—a thesis that unsurprisingly turns out to be verified by his analysis. Disputable as this way of proceedings may seem, the close reading of both authors, a reading that never loses track of its main goal and also never loses sight of the intended correlation between both works, is a very fine piece of scholarship. Equally laudable is, at this point, the proportion of the whole, one third being dedicated to the evaluation of earlier stages in reflecting the relation between Judaism and Christianity in terms of toleration versus recognition (with Baeck demanding full recognition for Judaism but failing to recognize Christianity, pp.149–152, and Harnack clearly refusing recognition altogether), the other two thirds to Franz Rosenzweig’s new approach of complementary Toleranz. In this part the study of the letters exchanged between Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock clearly outweighs the study of the relevant portions of the third part of the Star—and rightly so, the latter having been interpreted already by many others, while, as Surall admonishes, the entire exchange between the two rivals has been published in English and in Italian, but not yet in German. It seems to be the focus on this source together with his careful way of reading that allows Surall to minutely reject all kinds of misunderstandings Rosenzweig’s philosophy had to suffer in the course of its being used as an important part of Jewish-Christian dialogue. The admirable achievement of this book is to simply correct many misunderstandings and thus add to a better understanding and a well-founded mutual recognition of Judaism and Christianity. Gesine Palmer University of Luzern

Systems, Games, and the Player: Did We Manage to Become Human?

The essay is part of an overall effort to translate the traditions of German idealism and contemporary systems theory into a discourse infused by the rhetoric and operations of cybernetics. This is a step best tracked explicitly. The language of open as opposed to closed systems, feedback loops, autopoeisis, turbulence, chaos, and gaming not only characterizes a vast amount of the scientific and cultural programming taking place today; it is a rhetoric with deep roots in the traditions of critical theory, hermeneutics, and language-intensive philosophy. With reference above all to Kant, Hegel, Walter Benjamin, James Gleick, Fritjof Capra, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann.

Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Contemporary China (review)

dazzling achievement. The Triumph of Imperfection is a brilliant and, unfortunately, nowadays all too rare example of what a genuinely comparative perspective can accomplish in our age of globalization. His theory of literature and culture has great explanatory power and is solidly grounded in historical understanding and practice, going well beyond the stultifying clichés of contemporary cultural criticism, based on the (un)holy trinity of class, gender, and race. Thereby, Nemoianu pioneers a genuine intercultural approach to Western civilization, based on a deep appreciation and respect for human diversity and cultural otherness.

The Critic's Tact

J. Hillis Millers nuanced, precise, and detailed elaboration of speech acts in literature has encompassed, in addition to a volume of the same title (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), at least The Ethics of Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990), and Topographies (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995). The long-awaited appearance of Literature as Conduct is notable as a current update and consummation of certain theoretical issues into which he has delved over a significant stretch of his remarkably generative career, questions relating to the conceptual, rhetorical, representational, and ethical conditions under which literature is at once possible, felicitous, and impossible. The volume at the same time orchestrates a meticulous and multi-

Tracing the Photogram

. . . to examine more particularly the way the stylistic “cues” of film narrative work to structure our access to screen action’s photogrammatic basis. What should soon grow clear is that the reframed photograph and the consecutively rephotographed film frame can operate as systemic alternatives to each other within the same metatextual field. This is crucial. . . . Between photographic input and cinematic output, spectation’s middle term is the cognitive photo synthesis of subliminally determined movement. Much that attaches to this motion can be specified in four related ways. Between optic signal and cinema’s viewed world, the event of filmic manifestation. Between photographic still and motion picture, the photogram in motion. Between strip and screen, the track in action. Between footage and image, the text in process. (Between Film and Screen, 17)