Jean-Michel Rabaté

Writing the Image After Roland Barthes

In the final stages of his career, Roland Barthes abandoned his long-standing suspicion of photographic representation to write Camera Lucida, at once an elegy to his dead mother and a treatise on photography. In Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, Jean-Michel Rabate and nineteen contributors examine the import of Barthess shifting positions on photography and visual representation and the impact of his work on current developments in cultural studies and theories of the media and popular culture.

1913 : the cradle of modernism

List of Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Introduction: Modernism, Crisis, and Early Globalization. 1. The New in the Arts. 2. Collective Agencies. 3. Everyday Life and the New Episteme. 4. Learning to be Modern in 1913. 5. Global Culture and the Invention of the Other. 6. The Splintered Subject of Modernism. 7. At War with Oneself: The Last Cosmopolitan Travels of German and Austrian Modernism. 8. Modernism and the End of Nostalgia. Conclusion: Antagonisms. Notes. Index

Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism between Hysterical and Paranoid Modernism

The question of whether Surrealism played a positive or a negative role in the dissemination of Freudian ideas sounds rather blunt or normative, but it is a question I would like to pose less to judge Surrealism by trying to catch it in its distortions and blind spots than to test the validity and relevance of the “compromise formations” that have been produced in quantity during the process of globalization through which Freud s̓ theories have gone in more than a century. This domain is huge, but happily the axis linking Freud to Breton has been explored, while excellent essays have been recently devoted to the Lacan-Dalí connection. Popular culture seems to have adopted Surrealism and Freudianism with similarly warping hyperboles. If the jocular “This is hysterical!” may be blamed more on Charcot than on Freud, the phrase “This is Surrealistic” often rings as quasi-equivalent to “This is Freudian.” Beyond a surprising or shocking façade, one expects some readability, plus if not immediately heavy-handed sexual symbols, at least the suggestion that a carefully arranged thematic disorder will be recomposed formally so as to suggest the hidden logic of dream images. In a telling fashion, the 1998 exhibition on “Freud, Confl ict and Culture” mounted by the Library of Congress, after intense controversy, made much of its display of audiovisual documents; beyond illegible manuscripts in Gothic script and disappointing realia — such as a few rings or Freud s̓ couch fl oating in the air — these well chosen fi lms excerpts mostly from Hollywood classics made the strong point that Freudianism, although contested, survives thanks to a popular culture which it has literally shaped and permeated. Perhaps, then, the same may

Beckett's Three Critiques: Kant's Bathos and the Irish Chandos

Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founded Slought Foundation, and is an editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, and philosophy. Beckett’s Three Critiques: Kant’s Bathos and the Irish Chandos

Dora's Gift; Or, Lacan's Homage to Dora

Lacan reopened Doras case in 1957. In his 1951 talk (published in 1952), transference was the key; in the 1957 seminar, he focused on hysteria. Dora loved by proxy and refused to be an object of heterosexual desire. Her object was homosexual because Mrs. K embodied Doras essential question, femininity—a question that cannot be divorced from that of the lack of the phallus and her fathers gift of nothing, which is the gift of love. There is no greater gift than the gift of what one does not have. Drawing from Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, Lacan concluded with an analysis of the cultural meaning of the gift.

Duchamp's Ego

Taking my cue from two authors read closely by Marcel Duchamp in 1913, Pyrrho and Max Stirner, I explore the links the French artist established between scepticism and anarchism at a turning point in his theory and practice of art, especially as he started the fabrication of ready-mades. Both Pyrrho and Stirner extol the liberty of indifference that can be gained from ataraxia in the severing of all ideological bonds. Having reached a crucial point of undecidability, Duchamp was able not to choose between a Pyrrhic victory over the meaninglessness of death and the Pyrrhonian transcendence of art as revolutionary thinking.

How Beckett Has Modified Modernism: From Beckett to Blanchot and Bataille

Asking ‘How Beckett has modified modernism’ presupposes a definition of modernism and agency facing a critical consensus. Unlike the ‘historical’ avant-gardes, modernism as a category was applied retroactively to a preceding corpus. One often hears that modernism culminated in 1922, which situates Beckett as a belated ‘late modernist’. I would suggest a longer periodicity for modernism and see it continue after 1950. It would be represented by writers like Beckett and Coetzee and by theoreticians like Adorno, Greenberg, Bataille, Derrida, or Deleuze. Such a ‘late-late’ modernism will retroactively impact our current definitions of ‘high modernism’. Beckett contributed to this ongoing re-evaluation by transforming a few Proustian and Joycean premises. This essay focuses on Joyce’s later work and analyses how Beckett took over from Joyce a concept of the ‘posthuman’ that he deployed in The Unnamable. It requires to be interpreted with the help of the theories of the philosophers quoted above.

30@30: the future of literary thinking

All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?

SIGNS and MEANINGS: Pataphallics: Jarry’s Novels and Ityphallicism

Abstract This article discusses Alfred Jarry as a precursor of French modernism. With a particular focus on Messaline, Roman de l’ancienne Rome (1901) and Le Surmâle, Roman moderne (1902), I analyse the subtle ways in which the past and the future are intertwined and Jarry’s philosophy of sexual excess. In both novels, the main characters seek a paroxysmal erotic pleasure from which they die after reaching world records in sex-making. Read together, the novels work to create a lemniscate, the symbol of infinity symbolically represented, in modernism, by the speeding bicycle. In both novels, sexual excess leads to a superhuman transformation of women and men into a rigid phallus, underlying which is the fantasy of bisexualism.

Three ‘Jacques’ for one ‘Hélène’ (or, how to build a Gnomon with No-One)

Starting from the various ways in which the name of James Joyce is evoked in Cixouss critical books and essays, I sketch her unique position as a writer between psychoanalysis (with Jacques Lacan) and philosophy (with Jacques Derrida). If James Joyces last name can be translated as ‘Freud’ in German, if his first name can be variously Jim, James or even Jacques, then we may translate him into French as Jacques Joyeux. Taking my cue from varying strategies of address deployed in The Exile of James Joyce, I conclude by calling upon my own father, another Jacques, to provide a vignette that aims at replacing Joyces gnomon between the psychoanalytic symptom and the deconstruction of the letter by the postcard.