Zahi Zalloua

Figuration: Emmanuel Levinas and the image

The problem that concerns us here is figuration. Not the image, and not art, even though, of course, these themes are not unrelated to the arguments that follow. My initial hypothesis is that our current understanding of all these phenomena would benefit from our adopting a new perspective, from our yielding neither to an aesthetic line of inquiry, full of preconceptions about the beautiful, the work, and its meaning, nor to the more recent promotion of the incarnated image, which brilliantly summarizes a certain history but appears incapable of dealing with the new images produced during the last century (cinema, for example) and their anthropological, technical, and political stakes. This is why it seems necessary to ask a simple question: What is it that fundamentally drives man to produce images, to leave traces that are not read but seen and that touch us-to produce not signs, but figures? Returning to the act of production-to the compulsion to figurewe can expand our field of analysis beyond the narrow sphere of art and include childrens drawings, graffiti, and techniques of image production (photography, video, etc.). We can also depart, historically, from the tradition of the Christian image, of the icon and its incarnational model, so that the Lascaux paintings are as much at issue as Boltanskis installations or Fritz Langs films. To orient ourselves, let us take as our point of departure a famous image on which Georges Bataille-and not Emmanuel Levinas, who will be the focus here-has extensively commented.2 It is the image

Derek Attridge on the Ethical Debates in Literary Studies

The following is an interview with Derek Attridge, whose The Singularity of Literature (2004) has helped to reframe the ethical debates in literary studies in a highly innovative manner. This exchange took place via email, August-September 2008.

The Double Bind of the Intellectual: Toward a Hermeneutics of Skepticism

Like the just judge—whose legal judgment, as Jacques Derrida points out, does not simply consist of “applying the law” like “a calculating machine”1 but requires that each decision be the result of an invention—the public intellectual is often confronted with competing or conflicting injunctions, that is, a double bind: the ethical scene of undecidability. The Derridean intellectual confronts, and returns to, each event as a singularity, answering its interpellation as reader-judge, its call for “an absolutely unique interpretation.”2 In formulating this understanding of the intellectual, I put it in critical dialogue with Paul Ricoeur’s notion of a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” For Ricoeur, a “hermeneutics of suspicion” stands in opposition to a “hermeneutics of faith”; it contests the legitimacy of consciousness and its production of meaning: “After the doubt about things, we have started to doubt consciousness,” he writes.3 Ricoeur warns however that a hermeneutics of suspicion should not be conflated with the less desirable form of nihilistic skepticism: These three masters of suspicion [Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud] are not to be misunderstood, however, as three masters of skepticism. They are, assuredly, three great “destroyers.” But that of itself should not mislead us … All three clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a “destructive” critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting.4

Ideology is Not All

The question of ideology and how it relates to criticism is a highly contested matter in literary theory. For some on the Left, the relation is merely one of subordination: criticism is ultimately reducible to ideology, and one can really talk only of an ideology of reading. Yet ever since his 1989 Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek has reminded us and fellow Left-leaning critics of the necessity of becoming good readers of ideology. Indeed, against the twin deceptive attitudes of pessimism and optimism—pessimism about the prospects of effective critique and optimism about the end of history a la Fukuyama (i.e., about the fantasy of a postideological stance)— Žižek vigorously insists, “Ideology is not all; it is possible to assume a place that enables us to maintain a distance from it, but this place from which one can denounce ideology must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by any positively determined reality—the moment we yield to this temptation, we are back in ideology.”1 Zižek’s comment comes after a thorough debunking of prior understandings of ideology. As one would expect, Žižek dismisses the common view of ideology as false consciousness, arguing along with other critical theorists that it is counterproductive to see ideology as simply being about falsification or distortion.

The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (review)

Montaigne’s distinction between the philosophical notion of virtue and the more common notions of naïve goodness or innocence, a distinction that Hartle describes as central to Montaigne’s moral philosophy. Naïve goodness chooses the good instinctively whereas philosophical virtue chooses the good through reason and the will, overcoming the temptations of human nature through a process of self-mastery. However, Montaigne claims that the most perfect soul incorporates virtue into habit and no longer needs to struggle against nature but instinctively acts virtuously. Thus, it comes to resemble natural goodness (199-203). The broad scope of Hartle’s argument does not leave room for close, detailed readings of particular essays, which is unfortunate since the complex structure and style of individual essays is so much a part of Montaigne’s intellectual character. This, however, does not diminish the accomplishment of Hartle’s book, which is an important and welcome addition to Montaigne scholarship.