Mark Robson

Shakespeare's words of the future: promising Richard III

The question of temporality in relation to early modern texts, and to Shakespeare’s texts in particular, has been reawakened recently in terms of a debate which on the one hand is represented by a historicism that sees anachronism as fundamentally illegitimate, and on the other is advocated by a critical practice which favours some idea of ‘presentism’. This might be read as an attempt to differentiate between two different approaches to the notion of context, which is itself a shorthand for the relation of text to history. The former view treats context from the perspective of a moment of production, thinking of this either as a time of writing, copying or printing and so on, or else in a more obviously familiar theatrical sense. The latter takes into account the moment of reading, whether in the name of a responsiveness to times present, or as an admission of the ineradicability of reading’s own contextual determination. To draw on some no doubt overly schematic examples, Brian Vickers happily denounces any theory-influenced criticism as anachronistic, proposing that ‘anachronism distorts the past to suit the whims of the present’. Where Vickers is prepared to grant writers of the past fully realizable intentionality, modern writers have only whims. More subtly, David Scott Kastan writes in a book that he claims is ‘about reading Shakespeare historically’ that: ‘Shakespeare’s plays are always situated in and saturated by history. History marks the texts as they are set forth, and the texts continue to absorb new histories as they are performed and read.’ Ultimately, however, he wishes to ‘restore Shakespeare’s artistry to the earliest conditions of its realization and intelligibility’. And it is precisely on the point of presentism that Kastan differentiates his own position from new historicism. Yet this very saturability of the Shakespearean text is precisely what is at issue in arguments around temporality. Interviewing Jacques Derrida, Textual Practice 19(1), 2005, 13–30

‘A literary animal’: Rancière, Derrida, and the Literature of Democracy

Literature is a modern invention, it inscribes itself [elle s’inscrit ] in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secure in principle its right to say everything [ledroit de toutdire].Literature thus ties its destiny [destin ] to a certain non-censure, to the space of democratic freedom (freedom of the press, freedom of speech [opinion ], etc.). No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy.

The Baby Bomber

This article offers a reading of an image of a child dressed in the uniform of a Palestinian suicide bomber that circulated under the name ‘The baby bomber’. The author examines both the claims made about the picture by Israeli and Palestinian authorities, and the reception of the image in the Western media. Focusing on the representation of childhood and the representation of suicide, which come together in this image, the article addresses the emphasis on repetition, temporality and threat that marks the reception of the photograph. Linking the image to debates around the pornographic and September 11, the discussion is informed by the work of Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard and others.

HUM (-an, -ane, -anity, -anities, -anism, -anise)

To hum: to make a low continuous murmuring sound like that of an insect, such as a bee; to make a low inarticulate vocal sound, especially to express dissent or dissatisfaction, more rarely for approbation and applause; to sing with closed lips, without articulation, as if to oneself; to make an inarticulate murmur in a pause in speaking, arising from hesitation, embarrassment, etc.; to give forth an indistinct sound by the blending of many voices, the sense of humming perhaps an effect of distance; a hum is also a rumour, the buzz, one might say; to make something hum is to see it as busy, to make it a hive of activity (to continue a metaphor); in electronic terms, hum is the noise produced in a loudspeaker as a kind of interference, most often as an effect of the alternating current of the mains supply. Hum in this sense is the signal that accompanies the signal (or, better, that in the signal which is not recognised as of the signal); it is that which emerges from the speaker without being that which is spoken. All of these senses are to be found in the definitions provided in the OED.

An Other Europe

Does Europe exist? The identity of Europe has rarely seemed less certain. What traditionally might be conceived of as its conceptual, institutional, political, cultural and geographical unity and integrity have been extended, undermined, defended, strengthened or abandoned, according to your point of view. As debates around the possible inclusion of Turkey within a European Community (to which ‘Europe’ cannot plausibly be reduced) have shown, the world seems to divide into those who are no longer able to define Europe’s identity, and a collection of mutually opposed camps who are all too certain of what Europe is. If there is a consensus, then, it is that Europe must be rethought. Among those remarking the need not only for Europe ‘itself ’ to be thought through — in an analysis that includes conceptions such as democracy that ‘belong’ to the European ideal — are French thinkers Marc Crepon and Bernard Stiegler.1 They have pursued this separately, together, and as part of a larger grouping that operates under the heading Ars Industrialis, calling into question the existence of precisely that European ideal that is seemingly desired, feared and comprehensively misunderstood in almost every quarter of British politics.2 Such a rethinking of Europe in philosophical terms carries echoes of earlier attempts to do so; most obviously, this project recalls a text which unites three of the central influences on Crepon and Stiegler’s work, if only in French. Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated into French for the most part by Gerard Granel, also incorporates a section on the origin of geometry translated some years earlier by Jacques Derrida.3 As Granel points out in his preface, the crisis to which Husserl refers needs to be understood in terms of the division and uneasy settlement of Europe after the ravages of fascism, and of a ‘World War’ that had profoundly shaken any former sense of the European sphere as the World itself (iv). Husserl’s attempt to rethink

The sense of early modern writing

1. Introduction: The sense of early modern writing Part I: Senses reading 2. Rhetoric, in more than one sense 3. Is there an early modern aesthetic? 4. Poetrys defences Part II: Readings senses 5. To sign: Sir Thomas More 6. Swansongs 7. To hear with eyes 8. Blind faith Epilogue