Tilottama Rajan

In the Wake of Cultural Studies: Globalization, Theory, and the University

Theory today has become an endangered species, as evidenced by the resistance to difficult language. This is not to deny that it leads a quasi-life as the domesticated ground for what has replaced it, or as a form of prestige: a signifier for “cutting-edge” discourses. But in using the term here, I refer to the work that came into prominence after the Johns Hopkins conference on “The Structuralist Controversy” (1966), the modes of thought it made possible, and the antecedents for such thought going back to the late eighteenth century. Like the humanities generally, this Theory has become submerged in Cultural Studies, which displaced it in the nineties as a central concern of institutes, interdisciplinary programs, and lecture series. “New” academic undertakings in the humanities are by definition those that have a cultural focus. Occasionally we come across programs in “Theory and Cultural Studies” which equate fields that could overlap dialogically but are not identical. Let us grant that practices at the ground level of teaching are more diverse because hiring has occurred over generations; or that there are no absolute epistemic shifts because of what Mary Poovey calls a process of “uneven development,” in which “emergent” “rationalities” develop from “and retain a constitutive relationship to . . . residual domains” [Social Body 14–19]. At the level of marketing and image (and thus also the self-image of academics), Cultural Studies has become the primary focus of North American academic publishing in the humanities, which thus reimagines itself in terms of the globalism of culture rather than the nationalism of “literature,” even as the wider

Romanticism and the Unfinished Project of Deconstruction

This article looks back at the authors first book, Dark Interpreter, in the context of her subsequent work in British Romantic literature, contemporary theory, and Romantic and Idealist philosophy. It argues that Theory is not simply a presentist or futurist, and allegedly “progressive,” thought form; if seen as a problematized and recursive continuation of the history of ideas, it always folds a “going forward” into a “going back.” The author thus revisits Dark Interpreter in terms of what Foucault calls a “return and retreat of origins,” which her subsequent work has tried to unravel, so as to continue “the unfinished project of deconstruction.” She distinguishes this deconstruction from the more purely literary critical form it took in Yale deconstruction, linking it instead to an interdisciplinary and deconstructively encyclopedic mode of knowledge anchored in philosophy and literature that goes back to the Romantics and to a German Idealism concerned with what Derrida calls “the margins of philosophy” – a mode that is also explored (albeit differently) in Nicholas Halmis The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol.

THE MASK OF DEATH - foucault, derrida, the human sciences and literature

the novelist Raymond Roussel that was not translated until over twenty years later as Death and the Labyrinth. Reflecting on his past in the accompanying interview with Charles Ruas, he says, “No one has paid much attention to this book, and I’m glad; it’s my secret affair. You know, he was my love for several summers ... ” (DL 185).1 That Roussel is Foucault’s double is suggested by the juxtaposition of the interview, which concealed the further secret of Foucault’s own death, with the book, which begins with Roussel’s enigmatic suicide behind a door “locked from the inside.” Together the interview and the book on the early twentieth-century gay writer invite us to read Foucault’s corpus in the fold that joins theory and literature, exteriority and interiority, structuralism and phenomenology. They inscribe theory within its own autobiography. They confess and perform a certain non-identity in Foucault, between a public writing focused on the arche/genealogical structures of institutions and discourses, and a more reticent phenomenological voice whose concerns with being and nothingness emerge at the site of literature, and to whom no one has paid much attention. This non-identity, I suggest, can be situated in a broader movement from deconstruction to “post-structuralism” – terms that are by no means synonymous.2 Post-structuralism is theory’s technoscientific defense in the 1970s against the positivism of the human sciences, whose cultural capital it both questions and desires. Paradoxically it is this very society of the human sciences, based as Gianni Vattimo argues in communicative rationality,3 that Foucault’s work in the 1960s deconstructs from the more phenomenological vantage point of literature and psychoanalysis as countersciences that expose knowledge as “science” to an analytic of finitude. At issue here is the place, in contemporary theory, of phenomenology as the space where “the crisis of European sciences” unfolds in the 1930s and 1940s. This crisis first surfaces in the work of Husserl, who tries to reconstitute philosophy as “rigorous science.” Yet by a strange internal torsion phenomenology itself, intended by Husserl to be a “refashioning of science on a higher level,”4 becomes (in Heidegger and Levinas) the unworking of knowledge by alterity, and (in Sartre) a psychoanalysis of the bad faith that leads the for-itself to dwell in the epistemic simulacra of being in-itself. Ostensibly Foucault, as a post-structuralist, should have nothing to do with phenomenology, from which he often distances himself. But Foucault was not always a post-structuralist, even as he was only uneasily a structuralist. Foucault, like others, participates in a profound archeological shift, from a deconstruction made possible by phenomenology, to a post-structuralism that refigures deconstruction

The Web of Human Things: Narrative and Identity in Alastor

Labyrinths, weavings and related figures are ubiquitous in Shelley’s texts, whether they are used to characterise language or other ways of grasping the world, such as thought, vision or emotion. Thus in Prometheus Unbound language ‘rules with Daedal harmony a throng/Of thoughts and forms’ whose complexity it does not so much eliminate as contain within its own labyrinthine structure (IV.416–17). In an essay on imagery, Shelley describes the mind as ‘a wilderness of intricate paths … a world within a world’ (Shelley, 1911, II, p. 102). Perhaps the most famous of such images occurs in The Revolt of Islam, where Cythna describes the tracing of signs on the sand to range These woofs, as they were woven of my thought: Clear elemental shapes, whose smallest change A subtler language within languge wrought (VII.xxxii)

Blake's Body Without Organs: The Autogenesis of the System in the Lambeth Books

In his later prophecies, Blake laid out his system as a geography mapped onto the human body. But in the Lambeth books, Urizen is ejected out of order as a body in bits and pieces that is neither plant nor human. This paper explores Urizens body as a figure for Blakes own corpus and the disfiguration of its idealistic ambitions. Blakes later mapping of his system in a striated space with clear coordinates can be compared with Kants equation of system with “architectonic,” which he compares with a body whose parts form a whole. But what if the body is not the anatomical body Kant imagines but is composed of systems irreducible to phenomenal cognition: circulatory, digestive, nervous? The contemporaneous work of John Hunter marks the first disclosure in Romanticism of a body without organs that is “flesh and nerve” and that Deleuze finds in Bacon and Artaud. Played out in Blakes theatre of cruelty Hunters physiology lets us think of systems in a new, if traumatic, way: as enabled precisely by obstructions and blockages, as proceeding through involutions and convolutions that are in effect feedback loops, in short as functionally autoimmune.

“Something Not Yet Made Good”: Byron’s Cain, Godwin, and Mary Shelley’s Falkner

In 1837 Mary Shelley published her last novel, Falkner, laying to rest the wound of a Byronic Romanticism, in which Byron figures and is inextricably linked to her father, William Godwin.1 For Godwin had already invented Byron in misanthropic, brooding personalities like Falkland and Fleetwood. Shelley’s novel does not follow the Victorian turn against Byron detailed by Andrew Elfenbein, in which the development from an “immature Byronic phase to a sober, adult, ‘Victorian’ phase” becomes one of the century’s “master narratives” of transition.2 She wants to make her peace with the inoperative community of Romanticism as part of a care of the self, a care of her self, evident in her editing and archiving of its male celebrities: Godwin, Shelley, Byron. In Falkner, she therefore revisits both her bitter dis-figuration of the father-daughter relationship as incest in Mathilda (1819),3 and Godwin’s exposure of the “wounded masculine” of patriarchy in Deloraine (1833).

Excitability: The (Dis)Organization of Knowledge from Schelling’s First Outline (1799) to Ages of the World (1815)

This paper discusses Schelling’s attempt to think philosophy encyclopedically from his First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799) to the third version of his Ages of the World (1815). Taking up his transformative use of John Brown’s notion of excitability, both as scientific concept and as a principle of knowledge, I argue that these texts rethink the more totalizing architectonic of knowledge assumed in some of Schelling’s early work, where philosophy is the central organ of knowledge. I suggest that they produce instead a “general economy” (in Bataille’s phrase), in which the various disciplines revise and recreate each other. More specifically, I look at how philosophy and particularly the philosophy of history are rethought through the sciences: geology, cosmology, chemistry and medicine.

(In) Digestible Material: Illness And Dialectic In Hegel’s The Philosophy Of Nature

Hegel is often seen as a thinker who assimilates, or more melodramatically, “digests” otherness, including the self ’s otherness to itself. His philosophies of art, religion, and other subjects exemplify this incorporation of the other into an encyclopedic dialectical system. The redescription of alien domains in the terms of Hegelian philosophy can be seen as cognitive imperialism.2 Or this subsumption into a philosophical absolute of the process whereby spirit complicates itself may be located in the very structure of the dialectic as self-consciousness. Thus Gasche describes Hegelian self-reflection as the self-constitution of philosophy: even “the reflective mirroring process” is recuperated as an “alienating or metaphoric detour to itself.”3 Indeed Hegel himself parallels self-reflection and digestion. Noting that in chemical interactions each substance “loses its quality,” whereas the animal always “preserves” itself by “sublat [ing]” the “object and the negative,” Hegel describes reflection as digestion and digestion as the “organism’s reflection into itself ”: its “uniting of itself with itself ” (PN 395).