Jeff Love

Parody as polemos in Pushkin's The Shot

Abstract This article contends that classification of the Belkin tales as parodies— without careful analysis of how they function as such—conceals the exceptional qualities of Pushkin’s parodic praxis. Pushkin emphasizes a central paradox: i.e., that the dynamism of parody both militates against, and is fatally dependent on, the possibilities and limitations of that very form or convention which it seeks to attack. He develops a parodic technique whose fundamental movement is vigorously polemical, at once undermining and affirming a specific form or convention. This technique reveals contradictions which offer a glimpse of an unhampered freedom resistant to formal reduction and thereby inviting a new creative act. The crucial basis for this kind of parody is indeed contradiction—a form of continuous and inconclusive conflict that is the principal trope of the Belkin collection’s opening story, “The Shot.” In this sense, “The Shot” is emblematic of the whole collection.

Heidegger’s Radical Antisemitism:

With the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become impossible to avoid Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. There has been the expected controversy with Heideggerians on the defensive and the philosopher’s detractors condemning his work outright. But there has been little serious exploration of the matter aside from several recent works. This article builds on this literature on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and concludes that an anti-Semitic narrative lies at the heart of Heidegger’s history of the oblivion of Being as nihilism. Moreover, Heidegger adopts the narrative framework set up by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality. In the end, we assert that Heidegger advocates a kind of war against Judaism that seeks to eradicate the Jewish influence in the western tradition. Heidegger’s ‘metaphysical’ anti-Semitism aims to overcome the nihilism of the ‘Jewish Christian’ revenge [Rache] against death, a nihilism that has evolved into the technological effort to make everything secure.

Heidegger and post-colonial fascism

Alexander Dugin is considered a fringe figure in contemporary Russia. Yet, his writings exert considerable influence and develop a virulent nationalism that exploits the vocabulary of post-colonial resistance in an unaccustomed way. Dugin should not be ignored, and this article gives a brief account of Dugin’s peculiar brand of post-colonial thinking by reference to its central source: Martin Heidegger. Specifically, the article examines how Dugin adapts the anti-metaphysical thinking of Heidegger’s most radical work of the 1930s – a thinking that seeks to renew Western thought in an other beginning – to the context of modern Russia as it tries to free itself from Western (American) domination. Dugin aims at nothing less than the creation of a new Russian identity and destiny that will not only save Russia but also, in a nod to Heidegger, renew the Western tradition itself from the “outside.” If Dugin’s political project is ambitious, so is his interpretation of Heidegger which attempts to bring out the full radicality of Heidegger’s thinking, both as philosophy and as politics.

Histories of the dead

ABSTRACT This article questions certain presuppositions of historical narrative by reference to two other ways of dealing with the past, fictional narrative and archaeological investigation. Specifically, our investigation focuses on how narrative tends to efface the particular in attempting to represent it and how what we identify as a new school of archaeology attempts to restore the particular by putting in question the various ways it may be integrated into patterns of narrative. The article concludes by claiming that narrative tends to explain by ordering particulars in recognizable ways while the new archaeological approach intervenes in that process of explanation to put it in question and remind us of the ways in which narrative cannot but distort the past.