Book of abstracts
Keynote LecturesSvend Erik Larsen. How to Narrate the Other?
Comparative Literature, University of Aarhus, DenmarkIn various disguises the Other and Otherness has been a basic concern in human thought since Antiquity – a term for what cannot be incorporated in known forms of perception, experience and knowledge. In more recent thinking, among others philosophy, gender studies, psychology, psychoanalysis, post-colonial and other types of cultural studies, a paradox has been evident: The moment the Other has been conceptualized in positive terms, Otherness is displaced or it vanishes. This paper approaches the Other from the point of view of narrative practice and theory, asking the question: How to narrate the Other? My answer is simple: We cannot narrate the Other as Other, only our encounters with it. The paper will suggest certain narrative forms that shape this encounter and evaluate their importance in today’s globalized culture.
In my early carrier I have worked with language philosophy and semiotics in particular. Hence, many of publications focus on the study of sign system by which we generate and express culture and consciousness. This topic has been presented in Fortælleteori (1975) and Sémiologie littéraire (1984). The most comprehensive result in this field is my dissertation on the work of the Danish linguist Viggo Brøndal. An English translation of Tegn i brug (1994) is published with Routledge in 2002 under the title Signs in Use. Another research domain is literature and culture in the moderns city. Over the last 200 years the metropolis has embraced more and more aspects of the arts and of the everyday experience in the lives of a growing number of humans, including those who live far beyond the last stop of the bus. Literature gives shape to the imaginations we as humans create on urban conditions and thereby integrates the open and flexible urban reality and its global effects in an aesthetic and communicative context that allows us to grasp it, both in a historical and a topical perspective. In this field I have written on Honoré de Balzac among others. A third field interest is the role of literature in the shaping of the fundamental ideas by which we, in different ways throughout history, interpret our individual and collective lives, for example solitude, memory, personal formation or Bildung. On these topics I have published a book in Danish Mutters alene with Gads Forlag in 2002, and a book on Balzac I byen med Balzac was published in Danish with Odense University Press in 2002. The idea of personal formation has been instrumental for my engagement in the ongoing reform of the Danish high school system. A textbook on literary historiography, composed together with Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, har appeared with Aarhus University Press in 2005. In 2007 appeared Tekster uden grænser. Litteratur og globalisering with Aarhus University press. Current book project is a literary history for high schools and an introduction toliterature for Aarhus University Press' series Univers.Luce Irigaray (video conference)
Director of research in the Department of Philosophy at the Centre National de la recherche scientifique, FranceLuce Irigaray's written output advances at the rate of approximately one book per year, most of which are translated into English and Italian, but also into Spanish, German, Dutch, Hebrew, Greek, Turkish, Japanese, Sud Korean, Chinese, Indonesian etc. Three guiding principles determine the development of her thought:.
1) The critique of a masculine single-subject culture;.
2) The definition of parameters allowing for the establishment of an autonomous feminine sujectivity;.
3) The search for the philosophical, linguistic and political conditions making it possible for a culture of two subjects where neither of which is subject to the other..
The development of her oeuvre is undoubtedly chronological: 74-85 (from Speculum to Parler n'est jamais neutre), 85-92 (from Parler n'est jamais neutre to J'aime à toi), 92-2002 (from J'aime à toi to La Voie de l'amour), but the various dimensions are often present in the same book. Thus one may detect in Speculum, notably in the chapter on Hegel, the idea which later came to fruition in Etre Deux and La Voie de l'amour.
Luce Irigaray's way of writing is unique, at once rigorous and poetic. Her philosophical work seems to comply with the need to express in another way the wisdom as already demonstrated in Nietzsche's Zarathoustra and the importance of Hölderlin in the work of Heidegger, to quote but two examples. Moreover, like these two philosophers, to whom she has devoted partially critical books ( Amante marine et L'Oubli de l'Air, Minuit 1981 and 1983), she turned her attention to the origin of Western philosophy in order to question its presuppositions, whilst at the same time investigating the philosophies of the Near or Far East, notably India. Her book Entre Orient et Occident (Grasset 1999) is an example of this exploration and also shows how her interest in the East is not purely theoretical.
Attention to language, including to the poetic dimensions of language, is of crucial importance in the work of Luce Irigaray. And the analysis of language supported by research carried out within different languages and cultures, remains a decisive means in identifying the differences between masculine and feminine subjectivities and for discovering how to create links, private or public, between subjects as dissimilar as are men and women (cf Sexes et genres à travers les langues, Grasset 1990 and two special issues of the journal Langage: Le sexe linguistique and Genres culturels et interculturels, but also Le Partage de la parole, Leggenda, 2000 and The Way of Love.
What seems to guide the life and work of Luce Irigaray is the search for a more just, true and happy future for humanity. She envisages this as being made possible through the discovery, both in theory and practice, of a relationship with the other based on mutual respect of differences. This sort of relating between us, always starting from two, opens the way for a possible globalisation which would destroy neither individual subjectivities nor cultures. Thus may be understood her interest in sexuate difference, the most immediate and most universal difference which founds both the basic unit in a society and the possible gathering of all human communities.
In the last few years, Luce Irigaray has devoted a great part of her life to two main tasks:
1) to developing the articulation between sexuate difference and other differences (cultures, traditions, languages enz.) and proposing ways to pass from respect for difference in the most intimate relations to respect for differences in the most global and universal relations - Sharing the World bears witness of this work, and also Conversations (both forthcoming Continuum, London/New York, 2008)
2) to passing on her thought and its ethics through theoretical and practical teaching. The seminar that she holds with researchers doing their PhD on her work has part in such an undertaking. This seminar already took part in the University of Nottingham (2004, 2005, 2006) and in the University of Liverpool (2007). It will be welcomed by the Queen's Mary College of the University of London this year - Luce Irigaray: Teaching presents papers of the participants in the seminar at the University of Nottingham (forthcoming 2008, Continuum, edited by Luce Irigaray with Mary Green).
Ann McCulloch. Secrets and Betrayals: Art as Problem Solver.
Deakin University, Australia
The research that drives this paper explores the possibilities of art as a problem solver. This paper is part of a larger project which the research team hopes to determine through analysis of current cinema, literature, traditional and new media, how the community’s perception of clinical analysis of depression is formed and how this perception does not match actual treatments. This study begins with the hypotheses that depression in adults and adolescents can be traced back to childhood trauma and in many cases to sexual abuse of children. The project is focused on the issue of whether art (verbal and visual) does or can represent an experience of depression that is otherwise not successfully communicated. If indeed it is the case that art does represent otherwise inexpressible content communicating this with practitioners is vital so that patients’ expectations, shaped by art, can be aligned and debated alongside proposed treatment.
This paper will focus on the abused child - the silenced ‘other’. Indeed this paper will investigate the absence of even the status of ‘otherness’ for these victims without voices, and therefore means of empowerment otherwise allocated to groups in society that are categorized as the ‘other’. .It will show that art in its representation of trauma and depression always demonstrates that repression of pain is unproductive and indeed has ramifications related to mental and physical illness. Alongside this assumption there is the realization that in the real world as opposed to an artistic rendering of experience a confrontation with past trauma may not be the preferred pathway, or indeed the right pathway, in getting depressed people to overcome their anguish and illness.
This paper will interrogate a seeming impasse; it will focus on the extent to which secrets remain and betrayals are rife in the arena of child abuse. It will suggest that representations of depression and related trauma in the arts have significant findings that should assist the treatment of depression related to incest and child abuse. Finally it will end with a case study of the Australian painter .John Forrest who until recent times had always included in his paintings a symbolic ‘hole’ that served to render an arena of unresolved anguish related to child abuse. I will exhibit a selection of these paintings and ones he is in the process of completing in which he has, in his representation of pain, ‘entered the hole’.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen. Living in an Overheated World: Otherness as a Universal Condition.
CULCOM, University of Oslo, NorwayTzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian living in France, once quoted Edward Said, a Palesinian in the USA, who again quoted Hugo of St. Victor, a 12th century Augustinian monk who rarely left St. Victor Abbey in Paris, but who nevertheless reflected thus on what we today call cosmopolitan values:
The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.
The condition evoked by Hugo nine hundred years ago is now not only available globally, but many feel that it is being thrust upon them. Frictions between particularist identities of various kinds (ranging from nationalist to religious) and the forces of globalisation and cosmopolitanism are now the order of the day, and the political present is exceptionally complex. Taking Hugo's view as a starting-point, the lecture identifies fields of tension and discusses attempts to overcome them through the arts.
Eriksen, b. 1962, Dr. polit. (social anthropology), has worked for years with the politics of identity, ethnicity, nationalism and globalisation from a comparative perspective, often with an ethnographic focus on Mauritius and Trinidad. He has also published popular scientific works and essays on cultural complexity in Norway, either with a focus on norwegians or the multi-ethnic character of contemporary Norway. In recent years, he has published, inter alia, a book about Charles Darwin, a co-written book about selfishness, a co-written history of anthropology, a study of time and information technology, a book about the West and Islam after 11 September, an edited volume about globalisation and methodology, and a very short introduction to social anthropology. He is currently trying to write about rubbish, globalisation and flexibility.Eugene O’Brien. Texto Ergo Sum: Technology and the Changing Human. (video conference)
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, IrelandEugene O’Brien is Senior Lecturer and Head of the English Department in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick He has published the following books as author: The Question of Irish Identity in the Writings of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce (1998); Examining Irish Nationalism in the Context of Literature, Culture and Religion: A Study of the Epistemological Structure of Nationalism (2002); Seamus Heaney – Creating Irelands of the Mind (2002); Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing (2003); Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers (2003). He has co-edited: La France et la Mondialisation/France and the Struggle against Globalization (2007) and Reinventing Ireland through a French Prism : Studies in Franco-Irish Relations Volume 1 (2007) and Modernity and Postmodernity in a Franco-Irish Context. Studies in Franco-Irish Relations Volume 2(2008). He is editor of the Contemporary Irish Writers and Filmmakers series (Liffey Press) and of Edwin Mellen Press’s Studies in Irish Literature and Irish Studies series. He is editor of the Irish Book Review. director of the MIC Irish Studies Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland.
Reading by author Tabish Khair from his award-winning novel Filming
Born and educated mostly in Gaya, India, he is the author of various books, including the poetry collection, WHERE PARALLEL LINES MEET (Penguin, 2000), the study, BABU FICTIONS: Alienation in Indian English Novels (Oxford UP, 2001) and the novel, THE BUS STOPPED (Picador, 2004), which was short-listed for the Encore Award. His honours and prizes include the All India Poetry Prize (awarded by the Poetry Society and the British Council) and honorary fellowship (for creative writing) of the Baptist University of Hong Kong. OTHER ROUTES, an anthology of pre-modern travel texts by Africans and Asians, co-edited and introduced by Khair (with a foreword by Amitav Ghosh) was published by Signal Books and Indiana University Press in 2005 and 2006 respectively.Khair latest novel, FILMING, which examines memory and guilt against the backdrop of the Partition and the 1940s Bombay film industry, has been very positively received by critics internationally and has been shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Book Awards, a major book award in India. It was published in the summer of 2007; the paperback edition is due in 2008. MUSLIM MODERNITIES: Essays on Moderation and Mayhem, a collection of Khair's essays edited by Renu Kaul Verma, has just been published by VITASTA in India. The leading feminist house, ZUBAAN, will publish Khair's first illustrated book for children (Glum Peacock) in the winter of 2008.
1. Global and Cultural Others
Pavlina Radia. The Golem in the Room: Permutations of Otherness and Transnational Memory in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Salman Rushdie’s Fury.
University of Toronto, CanadaAs globalization has increasingly hybridized geophysical borders and boundaries, it has also produced a whole plethora of socio-cultural, gendered, and racialized asymmetries. Driving such asymmetries is a “new political economy of otherness” that, under the guise of collective diversity, reduces transnational others to alternative commodities (Braidotti 44). While critics like Braidotti focus primarily on debunking the consuming processes of globalization, contemporary literature draws attention to the ways in which the transnational’s memory does not escape its own commodification, but becomes what I call “the Golem in the room,” an uncanny yet healing encounter with animated strangeness that consumes from within. The anxiety surrounding such an encounter frames the recent novels, What We All Long For by Dionne Brand and Fury by Salman Rushdie, where the authors challenge the global grip by tapping into the psychological and multicultural geographies of the protagonists’ personal traumas. At the heart of both novels is the threat of being consumed not only by desire, but also by the usurping and destructive potential of memory that commodifies the transnational from within, hence the obsession with toy-making in Rushdie’s Fury and the ever-growing golemic lubaio project in Brand’s What We All Long For. In this way, both narratives externalize the multicultural subjects’ fears of cultural (con)fusion by deploying identity as an uncanny, albeit artistic re-production that is “not free-floating,” but rather “positioned in histories, cultures, languages, classes, localities, communities and politics” and thus inevitably enmeshed in its own otherness (Espiritu 12). In what follows, I argue that, through the golemic figures, Brand and Rushdie mobilize alterity as an intrinsic part of our humanity, a gesture that transforms memory from a phagic site of exclusion to a creative process of ethical intervention, a process that acknowledges simultaneously the otherness of the self and the selfness of the other.
Leah Harte. Borderlands of Identity: Negotiating the Self and the Other in Jhumpa Lahiri’s 'The Third and Final Continent' and 'When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine'.
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, IrelandThis paper explores the link between borders and identity as it relates to immigrant characters’ experiences with cross-cultural and inter-national passage in Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection Interpreter of Maladies . Additionally, since borderlands (both literal and metaphorical) participate as indicators of one’s identity, they, too, serve to distinguish the self from the other. Through their movement from country to country, Lahiri’s characters both cross over literal, territorial borderlines and negotiate metaphorical, cultural ones. Examples of this are most clearly found in the unnamed narrator of ‘The Third and Final Continent’ and Mr. Pirzada in ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine’. Homi K. Bhabha writes about borders in both a literal and metaphorical sense and is particularly focused on that area of the border itself. For Bhabha, borders are far more than merely markers of territory. Rather, border-spaces are regarded as significant indicators of threshold, denoting incongruence and ambivalence. At a border, at once either detaching or adjoining, one is on the verge, in a place that symbolizes either the coming or the going. He writes that ‘[t]he “beyond” is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past….we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion’ (Bhabha 1-2: 2004). Instead of focusing on the separation or the division, the transition that the borderline implies is highlighted; the ‘in-between’ nature of the boundary and the potential it possesses is emphasized. In Bhabha’s line of thinking, the lines between the self and the other are blurred as such transitional snippets of time can put forth multifaceted examples of identity. Just as the border itself is (often) simultaneously ambivalent and full of potential, so too are the identities of Lahiri’s characters as each navigates his or her way through emigrational passage.
Sten Pultz Moslund. Representation of the Other and Speeds of Becoming in Migration Literature.
University of Southen DenmarkTo Deleuze difference is what causes becoming (by contrast, sameness implies a state of being). Pure difference to Deleuze is a state of intensity over which we have no control; hence it triggers an immense speed of becoming. The arrival of the Other as pure cultural difference may thus involve a radical disruption of our world of sameness, causing our culture to change at great speed. This is often the philosophical underpinning of postcolonial migration literature, striving, as it does, to release the force of difference in the former imperial centre and set it off in a new heterogeneous and hybrid becoming.
However, cultural texts like migration novels necessarily engage in acts of representation – they represent difference, they represent the Other, and, to Deleuze, that which tames difference or slows down its force of becoming is representation. By representing e.g. Indian or African cultural difference in the language of a western host culture, the migration novel inescapably appropriates this difference within the language of sameness it sets out to challenge. This deflates any assertion of difference in the text and, with that, its capacity to radically challenge the sameness of the host culture.
I will propose that it may be useful in this respect to speak of a translation of difference rather than a representation of difference, as the metaphor of translation indicates how difference is indeed re-coded/ re-named when represented within the sameness of the host language, but also how some difference survives within this sameness, resulting in a slow cultural becoming.
My paper then invites a reflection on whether and how a text can generate different speeds of cultural becoming, depending on how thoroughly its representing/ translating language tames difference.
Is it at all possible to radically release the intensity and speed of cultural difference within, say, an English text – to “foreignize” one’s translation of difference (Venuti)? And does it matter – if the question is not one of change vs. no change (or hybridity vs. purity), but one of fast or slow change?
I will draw on examples from a few contemporary migration novels in English.
2. Engendering / Queering Otherness
Henriette Dahan Kalev. Constituting the Moral Subject: The Self and the Other in Gender Theories of Justice.
Ben Gurion University, IsraelPolitical Feminist readers in theories of social justice, such as McKinnon and Okin often present a radical critic that subverts traditional theories but tent to withdraw to liberal traditional solutions. McKinnon and Okin conclude their brilliant critical analyses of the patriarchal state or social institutions with legal propositions that eventually maintain patriarchal judicial structure or suggest family reforms that preserve the traditional bi-parental family structure. The argument that I present in this talk is that the limitations of feminist theories critics of social justice theories reside in their avoidance of entering the question of subject construction in these theories. The subject in social justice theories is always a self construction, one that is le noble sauvage, an autonomous and lonely subject (Hobbes and Rousseau for example). It is a subject who is unable to learn about himself through the Other. The presence of the Other to the One in traditional theories of justice is a source of threat, fear, envy, competition and conflict, as Syela Benhabib shows. In these theories the subject's gender is always male and when female enters the scene she is recognized as that who is not him, as his opposite. However, when psychoanalytical feminist theorists, such as Gilligan's and Chodorow's, discuss the question of the subject construction they unveil traits like intimacy and empathy as essential to the female construction of the subject. But here there is another limitation. Their conclusions remain restricted to theories of ethics rather then theories of justice. Nonetheless, they provide us with new perspectives that pave roads to the construction of the Other as its subject and to move on to theories of justice. After presenting the problems In this talk I wish to conclude by discussing the subject construction beginning from the Other and its projections on theories of social and political justice. I shall address this topic by referring to the question: To what extant can a theory of justice evolve around a subject construction that is an Other and not a self.
Ib Johansen. Female Others, Female Freaks - from P.T. Barnum’s American Museum to The Residents' Freak Show.
University of Aarhus, DenmarkIn Mary Russo's classic study The Female Grotesque. Risk, Excess and Modernity (1994) Mikhail Bakhtin's well-known reflections on the carnivalesque-grotesque and popular culture are reinterpreted in the light of some of the more recent insights of feminist theory, and in Russo's perspective there is also a decisive focus on the way(s) in which female abnormality and/or freakery are foregrounded in Western fiction and film (e.g. in George du Maurier's Trilby, 1894, Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, 1984, and David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, 1988). What I shall attempt to do in the present paper is trace a trajectory from the classic status of the female freak (and her male and other counterparts) in the Victorian Age (e.g. in P.T. Barnum's spectacular sideshows) - where the exotic "otherness" of the freak is clearly what primarily fascinates the audiences - up to a number of twentieth-century literary examples of female freakery (e.g. in Leonora Carrington's and Angela Carter's works). In these late(r) examples it may be said that the female freak is rehabilitated, and the existential costs of freakery are simultaneously emphasized - such as it is, incidentally, also the case in Katherine Dunn's hilarious and outrageous Geek Love (1989) or in the musical version of freakery presented to the public in Freak Show (1991) by the Californian avantgarde rock band The Residents. The winged woman (Fevvers) in Nights at the Circus obviously represents a utopian version of womanhood as well as a utopian version of (Bakhtinian) laughter, whereas Wanda the Worm Woman in Freak Show rather points in the direction of Kristevan abjection (the underbelly of the carnivalesque-grotesque).
Olu Jenzen. The Queer Uncanny: Sexuality and Otherness.
University of Sussex, United KingdomBy turning its attention to the particular aspects of the uncanny that we can link to the notion of queerness, such as the trope of the double, eerie repetition, a dissolution of the subject/object binary, and the strangeness of the familiar and the familial, the paper considers the role of the uncanny in relation to feminist and queer critical thinking on identity, kinship and the category of the human. My enquiry comes out of a longer work that considers when, why and how the fantastic impulse in literature and representations of sexual dissidence and/or gender otherness coincide. However, the central concern here will be to theorise on the possibility of the uncanny as an instrument of ‘defamiliarization’ which relates to the critical tools of the deconstructive thread of queer theory in that it destabilises the notion of the known and the knowable. The paper focuses in particular on anxieties about ontological boundaries in light of the contemporary theoretical writings of Judith Butler, Sue-Ellen Case and Lee Edelman, and in contemporary literature and proposes that by considering the queer as a challenge to the borders of natural and unnatural life, we may formulate a critique of the notion of naturalness which works to sustain the heteronormative paradigm. Sigmund Freud’s seminal 1919 essay on the uncanny attempts an operational definition of the term and yet, through its inconclusiveness, indicate the elusiveness of the uncanny, which by nature is that which is ‘to remain strange’. Reading Freud’s exploration of otherness vis à vis Edelman’s argument that the queer is the abject, the paper evaluates the political usefulness of a notion of the queer as a refusal of the ‘economy that regulates what is “legitimate and recognizable”‘ human within the Symbolic order (Edelman, 2004, p.105).
3. Irish Studies: Alterity and the Exile
Sarah O’Brien. An(other) Paddy Irish Man Joke … Representations of the Irish in Post-war.
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, IrelandThe origins and profile of anti-Irishness in Britain has been well documented by a number of historians, literary figures and sociologists 1. Invariably, these works focus on the overtly crude representations of Irish ethnicity that emerged in popular British media during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which portrayed the Irish as simian-like, psychologically inferior and irrationally blood-thirsty2. Many of these stereotypes emulated from Darwinian discourse and became particularly popular in British print media during and after spates of nationalist rebellion in Ireland. While the vociferousness of these stereotypes eased following the foundation of the Irish Free State, a caricature of Irishness endured in post-war Britain, in the form of Paddy-Irish man. Though this personification of Irishness was milder than nineteenth century representations, and stressed the humorous rather than violent traits of the Irish, it nevertheless fulfilled the purpose of confirming the polarised otherness, and inferiority, of the Irishman to the Englishman. The whiteness and apparent cultural similarities between the two countries heightened English society’s desire to establish the fundamental ‘otherness’ of the thousands of Irish immigrants in their midst. This became particularly important for English-Catholics, who feared that British mainstream society would associate them with the working-class, peculiarly-backward Irish immigrants that sat alongside them in Roman-Catholic church pews.
Consequently, Paddy Irish man jokes became extremely popular in oral and print culture in Britain; these portrayed the Irish as conniving, dependent, illogical and lackadaisical, a polar other to honest, industrious, plain-speaking and sturdy English society. This paper will dissect the characteristics and ramifications of these stereotypes, drawing on interviews carried out with Irish immigrants in Britain to reveal their awareness of their otherness in Britain and the consequent ways that they coped with these categorisations. The paper essentially argues that the seemingly harmless popularity of Paddy Irish Man in post-war Britain subtly reinstated the subordinate otherness of Irishness. Its comical context and popularity in radio and television, in comparison to coloured and black jokes, prevented Irish immigrants from out-rightly objecting against its usage, thereby moulding a silent, invisible and unthreatening minority in twentieth century Britain.
1 Particularly L.P Curtis, Sheridan Gilley, Roger Swift, Mary J. Hickman and Piarás MacEinrí. Playwrights who deal with the theme include Joseph O’ Connor, Tom Murphy, John B. Keane and Walter Macken.
2 Curtis, L.P., The Irishman in Victorian Caricature.
Michael Bøss. Nationalism and Inner Exile in Irish Culture and Literature.
University of Aarhus, DenmarkIn the first decades of the Irish Free State, a Catholic-Gaelic Irishness was institutionalised as part of the new state's nation-building project. One side-effect was the alienation of writers and artists who did not identify with the Ireland that was coming into being. Some chose to leave Ireland and go into external exile in Europe. Those who stayed lived on as "inner exiles". In both cases, these exiles reflect the irony that Irish nationalism, which was a product of an "exilic culture" responding to perceived English cultural dominance, created its own exilic others after independence. In my paper, I will discuss my own ideas for a sociology of exile and illustrate them with examples from early 20th-century Irish literature.
Catherine Swift. Sex in the Civitas: Early Irish Mandarins and their Sexual Fantasies.
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, IrelandIn a number of papers on early Irish law published in the 1980s and 1990s, Donnchadh Ó Corráin popularised the term “mandarin class” to describe both Irish poets and Irish churchmen. In this paper, it is proposed to extend his hypothesis beyond institutional and dynastic links between these two groups of professionals to examine evidence for a unified Irish vision of the social role of women as the disruptive “Other” who were largely responsible for social mayhem. This “other” could be both real-life women – who, as both concubines and adulteresses, could destroy the dynastic marriages arranged for them but also Otherworldly women, who might leave the magical lands of perpetual bliss and seek out and remove gifted human husbands as their prize. This is a far more pervasive view of Irish women in the early sources than the over-hyped and badly defined image of Medb as feminist warrior-queen and sovereignty goddess although these latter are undoubtedly the most common images to be found in the secondary literature. If the motifs of early Irish literature are to be properly understood and appreciated in their own terms, it is important that they be set against the characteristic stereotypes used by the historical society under consideration. In this quest the evidence of the early Irish canon lawyers and their fascination with the problems of adultery provide illuminating insights into female characterisation as found in the vernacular sagas.
4. Other Spaces, Other Places
Maria Beville. In Pursuit of Alterity – the Gothic Labyrinth as ‘Other Space’. Two Gothic-postmodernist Novels.
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, IrelandThis paper will analyse the significance of the labyrinth as both ‘other space’ and a space for the other in Gothic-postmodernist fiction with reference to Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. As the path to undecidability, the physical and metaphysical space of the labyrinth operates as the central metaphor of both Gothic and postmodernist literatures. Considered in this paper as a liminal space for the displacement of the other, what Foucault would refer to as a ‘heterotopia’: ‘a site where subjects and behaviours that fit only partially within dominant norms can be both contained and excluded’ (Botting), the labyrinth will also be analysed in and through its textual manifestation in the novel form. In the labyrinths of the Gothic-postmodernist text, the reader is, arguably, afforded the position of the other in the ‘placeless place’ (Foucault): the discursive labyrinth that is the language of the novel. At this juncture, new and radical approaches to prevailing Gothic themes of alienation and confinement are presented. In this context, issues of subjectivity and terror are emphasised as reality and unreality, chaos and order, darkness and light, escape and entrapment are merged. Thus, this paper will consider the heterogeneity of the labyrinth in Gothic-postmodernism as its key characteristic and as the central experience on the sublime passage from self to other in the above named texts.
References:
Botting, Fred. ‘Power in the Darkness: Heterotopias, literature and Gothic Labyrinths’
Foucault, Michel. ‘A Preface to Transgression’
Gökçe Özdamar. Experiencing the Urban Space as Other.
Istanbul Technical University, TurkeyThe subject of this paper derives from an experimentation as a woman flaneur in cities of Netherlands and is about on how some cities can weave their anonymous webs, thus transforming its urbanites into the “other” through its every day practices. The other; constructing the image of the city within his/her own practice emerging creates a new kind of urban space. But how can this creativity of the other add a value to the cement of social life and to the city narrative? What values converge in the urban space? Becoming the other and city narrative will be discussed in terms of architectural media and the city as a complex structure.
Maeve Tynan. Re-fusing Broken Records: Caribbean Creolization Revisited.
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, IrelandRejecting the fixity of Western taxonomies, Caribbean identitarian construction paradigms favour unbounded modes of being. The Caribbean subject has access to numerous and frequently overlapping discourses of identity formation. For example, through choosing to identify with either the country of origin, country of arrival of space in between, the Caribbean subject can align with Africa/Asia/Europe, with Caribbean regionalist models or with diaspora theories. As a point of connection and separation the Caribbean Sea represents a powerful metaphor for the region’s transformative nature. Dwarfing the achievements of man, the passing of empires and epochs, the boundless waves are a constant reminder of human insignificance in the wake of the unceasing elemental.
Where Barthes reads of the sea as a ‘non-signifying field’ that ‘bears no message’, Caribbean artists counter this conception of aqua nullius by reading the sea as a shifting narrative that resists the fixing impetus of Atlantic historiography. A repository of the past, the swash and backwash of recurrent tides bear witness to the continual inscription and erasure of time, and are thus possessive of atemporality; the sea is a palimpsestic record in which successive ages are contained. Its very resistance to stable inscription and ultimate decryption testifies to its appropriateness for a continually evolving Caribbean present and presence. Cross-referencing pictorial and poetic representations of the landscape/seascape ‘tidalectic’, this paper attempts to foreground the motile and fluctuating nature of Caribbean creolization as a process not of product, a journey rather than a destination.
5. Constructing Hegemonic Selves
Damien Shortt. Masters and Slaves: Britain’s Cultural Selves in Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin.
Edge Hill University, Lancashire, EnglandThis paper will explore the representation of self and other in Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin (2006); it will argue that this novel functions as a cultural diagnosis of contemporary Britain’s crisis of identity. The novel’s protagonist, David Carter, belatedly discovers that he was adopted shortly after birth, and endeavours to find his biological mother. The setting of much of the novel’s action in Coventry, a city significantly rebuilt following WWII, and its narrative span from 1945 to 2000 leads the reader to conclude that Carter’s journey of self-discovery is closely mapped onto the concordant renegotiation of ideas of Britain and Britishness following the two world wars. What will be seen is that McGregor presents a complex, and philosophically sophisticated meditation upon both the idea of self-identity and the manner of its construction; through Carter’s journey, he incarnates the Hegelian master-slave death-struggle and presents a form of reconciliation between the two that allows both to co-exist within the same conceptual space and at the same time.
In addition to exploring the Hegelian resonances in So Many Ways to Begin, this paper will also attempt to assess McGregor’s literary nous and his employment of authorial techniques in his endeavour to present such a wide-ranging, yet in-depth critique of contemporary Britain. Ultimately, what will be argued is that Jon McGregor is a young artist of considerable note who has valuable things to say about the possibilities and potential for the harmonious coexistence of cultural selves and others.
6. Pre-oedipal Others: Monstrous M/Others, Children, and Doubles
Susan Yi Sencindiver. Pregnant Doppelgängers.
University of Aarhus, DenmarkMy paper considers the Janus face of the doppelgänger and the maternal gestating body, approaching their mutual affinity from inverse perspectives: Depicting a caesura of life within life, the fragility and interior discontinuity of identity, a body literally split into two, the pregnant and parturient woman articulates the customary attributes native to the stomping ground of the literary doppelgänger motif in new and exciting ways; conversely, I advance the idea of the classic male doppelganger narrative as symptomatic of pregnancy and childbirth – a symptomatic and emending reading that in itself constitutes a strategy informed by a spatial logic of pregnancy that, moreover, interrogates and traces the fictional doppelgänger’s entstehung, its conditions of emergence.
Gry Faurholt. Self as Other: The Doppelganger.
University of Aarhus, DenmarkThe central premise of the doppelganger motif poses the paradox of encountering oneself as another; the logically impossible notion that the “I” and the “not-I” are somehow identical. Originating in the German Schauerroman and the British Gothic novel, the doppelganger is an uncanny motif that explores the dark, hidden depths of the human psyche. Its terrifying effect often hinges on the fantastic hesitation between a supernatural and realistic explanation: is the menacing doppelganger a paranormal phenomenon or a symptom of madness in the protagonist? Several studies of the motif recognize two distinct types of doppelgangers: (1) the alter ego or identical double, the mirror image of a protagonist who seems to be either a victim of an identity theft perpetrated by a mimicking demonic presence or subject to a paranoid hallucination; (2) the split personality or monster double, the dark half of the protagonist, an unleashed vengeful fiend that acts as a physical manifestation of a dissociated part of the primary self. Studies of the doppelganger which consider these distinct types, tend to view the difference between them as a formal one only.1 Although both types concern the basic theme of identity crisis, readings of the doppelganger motif based on the dynamics of these types are typically incongruous with one another, e.g. the familiar Ego vs. Id reading of the split personality doppelganger (as exemplified in Jekyll vs. Hyde or Frankenstein vs. the Monster) proves unsuccessful when applied to doppelganger narratives featuring identical alter egos. However, if these two types are seriously treated as distinct, yet complementary, perspectives on the theme of identity in crisis, a reading of the doppelganger motif emerges in which, on the one hand, the alter ego tales delineate a pre-Oedipal protagonist, whose second self, a social “I”, supersedes the former, depriving him of his identity; while, on the other hand, the split personality stories outline a protagonist who conversely represents the post-Oedipal social “I” now threatened by the return of the repressed, abjected other which is revealed to be the self.
1 This typology of the double originated in Otto Rank. Der Doppelgänger: eine psychoanalytischer Studie. Leipzig, Vienna, and Zürich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1925. For a thorough description of the two types see John Herdman. The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990
Patricia Griffin. The Otherness of Childhood – Cinema’s Difficult Relationship with the Child.
University of Ulster, Belfast, N.IrelandRoland Barthes suggests that from his past it is his childhood which ‘fascinates’ him most; ‘…it is not the irreversible I discover in my childhood, it is the irreducible: everything which is still in me, by fits and starts; in the child, I read quite openly the dark underside of myself – boredom, vulnerability, disposition to despairs (in plural, fortunately), inward excitement, cut off (unfortunately) from all expression.’ (Barthes, 1977).
The child as Other is an adult construct - a fantasy, but also a reality in that she/he is a psychological reflection of the adult world – summoned up from memory, history, revisited and revised – a reflection of loss, of difference. Or, as Jacqueline Rose suggests: ‘…childhood is something in which we continue to be implicated and which is never simply left behind. Childhood persists…’ (Rose, 1992).
Cinema has a long history of re –presenting the image of the child/childhood as Other on the screen – multiple, contradictory, mythical images, often difficult to negotiate – contentious depictions of the innocent (tabula rasa), of the monstrous (the bodies or sexuality of the prepubescent female child becoming the site of Kristeva’s/Creed’s notions of the abject) - recurrent motifs, themes, patterns which filmmakers appear to recycle from film to film.
This paper aims to explore the ways in which some cinema has attempted to engage the child/childhood as Other in a more equal discourse. Jane Campion, Victor Erice, and Abbas Kiarostami have all produced cinematic images which seem to draw the Otherness of the child out from the margins. Through their negotiations with form and content these filmmakers appear to meet the Other in a manner similar to the way in which some writers engage with l’écriture féminine.
7. Vision and Photographic Spectrality
Susana Viegas. Cinema, the Other and the Reversibility of the Eye.
New University of Lisbon, PortugalLa phénoménologie de la perception, written in 1945, became a landmark both in Phenomenology and Philosophy and it's the major work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It was also in 1945 that Merleau-Ponty gave a conference, many times forgotten, “Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie”, a temporal coincidence that points out that perception and cinema are undoubtedly connected. As the author puts it, “le cinéma est particulièrement apte à faire paraître l'union de l'esprit et du corps, de l'esprit et du monde et l'expression de l'un dans l'autre” (Sens et Non-sens). We immediately connect this view on aesthetics to painting, mainly to Cézanne, but considering cinema as exemplary as he did, we can realize how the cinematographic approach to the other and to oneself is possible; but doing so we no longer stay in the aesthetics' field. Through cinema, we can analyze the process of becoming visible, not only our primordial relation with the world but more precisely with the other: with cinema, the invisibility of our relations with the other becomes visible and this is, as Stefan Kristensen puts it, an ethic field. Both painting and cinema reveal the dialectics between visible and invisible, in the same way it happens with our hands: when they touch they are also touchable. In cinema, the eyes that see are also visible: “moi le voyant, je suis aussi visible” (Le visible et L'invisible). Firstly, this paper will collect the cinematic conditions of creating this reversibility of the spectator's eye; secondly, and against Merleau-Ponty's idea, it will argue that a movie can be an expression of thoughts just as it expresses human behaviour; and finally, the main question will be: in which sense this dialectical reversible process approaches us to the others.
Lewis Keir Johnson. Others and their Others: Spectrality and Monstrosity in the Photographs of Roger Ballen.
Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, TurkeyThis paper will explore the hypothesis that the impact of some of the recent photowork of Roger Ballen depends on a series of disturbances of photographic space in which the legibility of others is de-composed by a staging that points to photography's failure to suture the traumas of light. In so doing, I shall argue, Ballen's work draws us into an experience of the otherness of the photographic image and the spectrality and monstrosity of the relations to others it both represents and cannot prevent.
Ballen's photobooks Outland (2001) and Shadowchamber (2005) have been particular objects of critical attention, evincing disturbances of discrimination - between black and white in and beyond the South Africa he has photographed. I shall trace some of these objections to his work and how they betray a desire to secure photography as a means of a representative representation of others and/or otherness, a framing that stands in for and enables a forming of views about others. I shall indicate, however, how Ballen's controversial recent work does not move from landscapes to 'interior landscapes', as has been claimed, but continues with discoveries in his work at least since Platteland of 1995 in which a characteristic staging of others in a sort of tableau-space, outside, but more insistently inside dwelling-spaces, emerges.
It is in the photographing of others in such tableau-spaces, which are the spaces of other pictures and pictorial figures, thematizing the particularity of photography among other images and other image and figure making practices that Ballen intensifies the experience of photographic space to the point of exposing its inability to suture the traumas of light. In Platteland, soliciting thoughts of the gaze of others, a thin white woman and boy stand on a bed, holding up 19th century pictures of cherubic babies either side of a landscape with giraffe on the wall behind them. In his later work, as others have noted, it is the wall which becomes the site, of scrawlings, smearings, the tacking-up of untwisted coathangers, a series of sites against which others - including other animals, dead and alive - stand out or hide, even stand out by hiding. In Shadowland, a small black hand holds up what looks like a dead white goose by the neck above a wooden headboard over which a detached doll's arm hangs; a cable hangs against the splashed wall behind.
I shall propose, then, that what disturbs in Ballen's work is the staging of what others use to stage their relation to being seen in space, negotiating their othernesses via what stands for (some of) their others and recalling, through the varieties of what stands out and fails to, in these haunting photographs, the traumatic separation of light (as suggested by Irigaray) and its ideal and repressive distributions into black and white.
Carrie O’Connor. Reconstructing Eve: Specters and Identities of the Transforming Ideal.
Louisiana State University, USAIn light of increased critical works on photography and its literary effects during the nineteenth century, the French author Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s 1886 novel, L’Eve Future, which ponders the ideal woman, while exploring the issues of artifice, fetishism and new technologies, merits a new reading. In this study, I examine how the use of photographic techniques and images in the text reinforce the Derridian notion of spectrality, that is, an appearance that is at once repetition and first time. According to the Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française, specter is borrowed from the Latin spectrum or simulacrum, as well as a term created to translate the Greek eidolon, or idol. Villiers’s text at once problematizes the ideal and mimesis through the android character, Hadaly.
The photographic image is concerned not only with identity, but with memory and spectrality. The photographs in L’Eve Future represent artificial identities of their subjects. Alicia Clary’s (the beautiful, but spiritually deficient, love interest) identity undergoes multiple transformations: first, her image is reproduced in a photograph; second, the photographic image is used to create a physically identical artificial being; finally, all of these visual transformations take place in a literary text. In the novel, these multiple forms of identity are united and separated through the use of new technologies, like photography.
Alicia’s natural identity becomes confused with her imposed identity on Hadaly, the android. L’Eve Future presents real, tangible impressions (photographs) that create artificial illusions (android). The photograph attempts to connect the two self-representative notions of identity and specter through a fixed temporal and spatial point. Villiers’s L’Eve Future challenges identity, spectrality, and the resulting transformations through this medium.
8. Animal Alterity
Fei Shi. The Other Abjection: The Queer/Animal Self in Contemporary Films. (live video conference)
University of California, Davis, USAThis paper explores the ambivalent portrayals of a kind of troubled yet aggressive subject in abjection in contemporary queer films, such as Portuguese film O Fantasma and Argentinen film Un Año Sin Amor to test a domain of questions on the theoretical border of Animal Studies and Queer Theory. The writer considers the intersections of these two discourses as both philosophically challenging as well as critically urgent, to unravel an alternative psychic mapping of the slave, to account for an unnamed resistance and to figure out the bodily presences, co-existential with/ implicated in our subjective understanding of the animal and queer other.
In delineating the body politic of these films, we may further contemplate how the queering/querying bodies disrupt the regulatory fiction of the ontological coherence of the human self. The infectious body and the painful pleasure as a way of healing in the Argentinean film Un Año Sin Amor and the disruption of the boundary between the othering and othered through the illicit human-animal body and queer-animal abjection in the Portugese film O Fantasma both destabilize the cultural perfomative of a presumed norm, which is reiterated through the body to the extreme. To perform and hence to gain pleasure from the performative becomes not only a revolting strategy, but also a risky bodily resistance to what tend to operate and oppress their lives.
The grotesque fluidity of the representations of the queer/animal/slave bodies in these films reveal the important cultural attitudes, concerns and imaginations that underwrite the construction of these figures. The figure is the murky instance, or the dirty contingency that is deeply enmeshed in the complicated relationship between body and discourse: to construct the figure of body through discourses or the discourses are already embodied within the figure. This figure of the other, most capable of physical and bodily intercourses, exchanges, permutations and engenderings, manifests as the subjects’ desire for the possibility of an absolute excessive mode of desiring.
Eric Min Chen. Insects as "the Other" of Human: a crosscultural study of Franz Kafka and Pu Songling's metamorphic stories.
Pallas Institute, University of Leiden, NetherlandsInsects have a respectable literary pedigree in both European and Asian cultures and are coded culturally. They, as "multiple singularities without fixed identities" (Deleuze), pose the question of radical otherness not in metaphorical but in bio-morphic terms, that is to say as a metamorphosis of the sensory and cognitive apparatus. An immediate example is Franz Kafka's landmark work of modernism Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), which was possibly inspired by the translated version of a short story collection Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liao Zhai Zhi Yi) by Pu Songling (1640-1715), the early-Qing Dynasty Chinese author and a master story teller of human-animal transformations, particularly Cuzhi, a story about a scholar's son turning into a fighting cricket as a filial sacrifice. Both cases will be approached in my paper in comparison to expose the social/individual problem of muteness and identification and discuss the (in)compatibility between the body and the voice of human.
Sune Borkfelt. Non-Human Otherness: Animals as Others and Devices for Othering.
University of Aarhus, DenmarkWhile we may tend to think of othering as a process by which humans can distance themselves conceptually from one another, the relationship between the human and the non-human is just as much a site for othering as any inter-human relationship. Indeed, what does it mean to be human if it does not stand in contrast to something else, something other than human? This paper argues that the common tendency to assume a naturalness of the difference between humans and non-human animals, and thus set it beyond discussions on othering, is false, and that indeed the relationship of humans to non-human animals, not least in the Occident, is based on the same cultural features that play a part in the othering of human groups as well. Through examples of how European views of animals and nature have played a role in imperial and colonial processes, it aims to show how the othering of animals can have consequences that lead to the othering of human groups as well and that our perspective of the human other is often very similar to our views on non-human others. Given this, it will be explored through a number of examples how representations of non-human animals – ranging from colonial hunting narratives, over the animal stories of Rudyard Kipling, to King Kong and contemporary animal representations – can be devices for othering of humans as well as animals. Finally, the question of whether representations can avoid becoming devices for such othering, and may even work against it, is asked and some possible answers given.
9. Literary Otherness
Steven Bond. Alterity and Transcendence: From Dedalus the Dub to Hamlet the Dane.
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, IrelandSamuel Taylor Coleridge, under the influence of German idealist philosophy, came to reject Ben Johnson’s reduction of the character of Hamlet to an immoral villain, and furthermore, to a facet of Hamlet that was subordinate to the unfolding of plot. Coleridge here anticipates the later existentialist/phenomenological turn to the problem of subjectivity in fashioning Hamlet as embodying a morbid excess of meditation upon inward thought. On this account, Hamlet’s preoccupation with ‘words, words, words,’ “which are, as it were, the half embodyings of thoughts, that make them more than thoughts, give them an outness” symbolises the attempt to transcend solipsistic restriction.
This paper proposes to examine James Joyce’s utilisation of the character of Hamlet in fashioning Stephen Dedalus’s own flirtation with the other, captured in similar flights of linguistic phenomenology, in which the external world is reduced to little more than an object of pun and wordplay. Joyce conjures up Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkeleian idealism as emblematic of Dedalus’s attempted re-connection with the world of external things. Dedalus (who dresses in black, and conceives of his home as Elsinore) is, like Hamlet, all soul. Leopold Bloom, by contrast, is all body - and the unity of the Cartesian dualist self raises itself as possibility.
In a final Levinasian turn, the attempted reconciliation is nullified, again by Dedalus’s reduction of the world to mere phenomenological wordplay. In the halfway house of language, the other (Bloom) is almost attained - the two characters are here referred to as “Stoom and Blephen” - but ultimately the characters separate, and Joyce withdraws the vision of reconciliation with which we have been tempted. Entire hermeneutical enterprises have been built upon the fact that, for both Shakespeare and Joyce, the problem of subjectivity remains an insoluble one.
Joern Erslev Andersen. The Art of Tuning the Caesura.
University of Aarhus, DenmarkIn his book La pensée du dehors (1966) Michel Foucault states that the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin is the first to purge 'the Gods' from language in 'modern literature' (Foucault derives the concept of 'modern literature' from Blanchot). The Gods' disappearance from the domain of language permits the possibility of construing 'otherness' as a part not in but of poetic language. In an affirmative as well as a critical discussion of this statement I shall examine Hölderlin's concept of "the caesura" as it is presented in his afterwords to his own translations of Sophocles (Oedipus and Antigone). This concept treats an indeed complex and condensed kind of poetic thinking about 'Otherness'; i.e., 'what is outside' (language) as something occurring both in the semantics of the text and in its formal patterns. Such textual features brought together in one and the same concept, namley in "the caesura", enable a 'pure infinity' beyond the boundaries of language, which, moreover, refuses to be embedded in any kind of relation between the naming and the named. Hölderlin's remarks on "the caesura" as it pertains to a "pure word", as a "counter rhythmical break in the imaginative flow of the scenes" (the narrative), and as a division of a text into (at least) two isolated parts, will finally be presented as being vastly misunderstood in contemporary deconstructive modes of reading.
Benjamin Jon Boysen. Being Another: Nothingness, Ambivalence, and Heterogeneity in Francesco Petrarch and William Shakespeare.
University of Southern DenmarkFrancesco Petrarch (1304-1374) and William Shakespeare (1564-1616) can in many ways be said to constitute the very epitome of the Renaissance. Taking my point of departure from an analysis of key concepts in the work of these poets, I will aim at providing a sharpened understanding of the perception of subjectivity in the Renaissance as being determined by the heterogeneous and by the representation. The purpose is therefore not only to present an analysis of Petrarch and Shakespeare, but furthermore to show how subjectivity in the Renaissance was understood through the representation and heterogeneity. In the works of Petrarch (which in this case primarily means his famous cycle of poems, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta) the reader is confronted with a highly ambivalent conception of love. This entails a kind of phenomenological discussion about the status of the object as being radically decentred, because it proves to be determined and given by the other instead of being situated as a substance or essence. The ambivalence facing Petrarch is thus the result of the conflict between the yearning for being alone with and for oneself - in order to keep the self-presence and subjectivity unsoiled by the other or the alien - and the recognition of the fact that it is not possible to see oneself see oneself; in other words it is not possible to appear to oneself without a medium, the mirror, the other, the representation, the non-identical, etc. The perception of the non-identical is in addition conspicuous in the works of Shakespeare, where an extensive glossary of the word 'nothing' is spread out over the tragedies, the comedies, the history plays, the romances, the sonnets, the poems, etc. The concept is here given a rich diversity of significations such as: death, nonsense, angst, language, imagination, creativity, creation and destruction, the female sex, meaninglessness, eroticism, emptiness, jealousy, love, time, becoming, and art. Petrarch and Shakespeare are thereby displaying how Renaissance perceptions of existence, identity, and subjectivity were heterogeneous, alien, and decentred - but also free, expanding, and open. To put it differently, these poets illustrate how the subjectivity of the Renaissance was constituted by a deeply rooted feeling of - being another...
10. Beckett and Levinasian Ethics and Aesthetics
Lasse Gammelgaard. Eschewing the Other in Quest of the Wombtomb.
University of Aarhus, DenmarkThis paper will probe the exploration of the ontological status of human subjectivity and consciousness in Samuel Beckett’s only film titled Film. The protagonist O (for Object) is in flight of the camera E (for Eye) but eventually discovers that E is not extraneous to self. Beckett deploys Bishop Berkeley’s dictum “esse est percipi” as a motto for Film, which means to be is to be perceived. To Berkeley one exists because the all-seeing Eye of God ensures that everything and everyone are in perception. However, Beckett uses this in a post-Nietzsche world in which there is no God. He has been replaced by human apperception: to be is to be perceived by oneself. O objects to being the object of E’s gaze but in vain, as he discovers in the final unheimliche encounter that E is a projection of himself. The camera metaphor is based on a pun on the homonymic equivocation of the camera I/eye; it is both a perceiving eye but also a projection of the I of O. In the script to Film, Beckett states that O is in “Search of non-being”1, but the impossibility of escaping his decentred and fragmented ontological status inflicts anxiety.
Chapter four in Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot titled Freud’s Masterplot: A Model for Narrative uses the psychoanalytic notion of the death drive (thanatos) to describe desires in narratives, and this is very fecund to the discussion of alterity in Film; the search of non-being is a movement forward but such a “progress may also be […] the narrative of an attempted homecoming: of the effort to reach an assertion of origin through ending, the time before in the time after [or simply] that transcendent home.”2 In the script Beckett says that the room O ends up in “may be supposed [to be] his mother’s [but that] this has no bearing on the film and need not be elucidated.”3 This remark is moving as it has great bearing on the film. What started out as a quest for the tomb also becomes a quest for the womb (Beckett uses this rhyme in More Pricks than Kicks and Molloy).
Failure is central to Film (indeed, to all of Beckett’s works) and neither the flight from apperception nor the craving for death and the embryonic pre-life prove successful.
1 Beckett, The Complete dramatic Works, p. 324.
2 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 110-111.
3 Beckett, The Complete dramatic Works, p. 332.
Orla Slattery. Alterity and Antipathy: The Plight of Anti-Levinasian Man, in Beckett’s The Expelled and Other Novellas.
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, IrelandThe philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is centrally focused on the theme of Otherness. In Totality and Infinity he argues that, it is the encounter with the other that alone, offers the prospect of authentic self-hood, for while initially we may live at the level of sensibility, concerned only with the satisfaction of our own needs, that it is the encounter with another individual that enables us to transcend the limitations of our egocentric predicament. For Levinas, the encounter with the other is not only the ground of Ethics, but it becomes the means to our own salvation ; there is as he sees it, a necessary transition that must be undertaken, whereby we must respond positively to the challenge that the other presents. We must embrace the responsibility for the other that this encounter brings about, and he comments that “The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation, which no interiority permits avoiding”. We have therefore, a fundamental responsibility for the other, and it is only in assuming this responsibility that I can discern my own human self-hood.
In this paper I shall argue that the marginalised anti-hero featured in the Expelled and Other Novellas, provides the perfect counterpoise to the Levinasian ethical agent; Beckett’s protagonist demonstrates a general antipathy towards all forms of Alterity, but reserves a particular distain for the other individuals he encounters, saying that,
What mattered to me in my dispeopled kingdom, that in regard to which the disposition of my carcass was the merest and most futile of accidents, was supineness in the mind , the dulling of the self and of that residue of execrable frippery known as the non-self.
Other selves are treated by him, either as a means to an end, or as objects within his subjective universe, and every such encounter that he undergoes, rather than alleviating his suffering, contributes to it. Unable to respond positively to the challenge that the other presents, he remains trapped within the sphere of his own subjectivity. Hell for him, to invoke the Sartean maxim, truly is other people, as such he turns away from humanity, actively seeking out spaces of exclusion;
“It is easy for a man, a proper man, to live in a cave, far away from everybody”
In documenting the plight of his anti-hero, Beckett’s The Expelled can be viewed as a cautionary tale, for in refusing to respond positively to the challenge of Alterity and remaining trapped within the confines of egocentricity, the result can only be one of complete despair; in abandoning our responsibility to the other we are doomed, and thus forfeit the prospect of authentic self-hood, for this is the unfortunate fate of the protagonist who having spent his time in the cultivation of his ‘dispeopled kingdom’, can achieve no resolution, and in the end, lacks either the courage to end his suffering or the strength to go on.
Özge Ejder-Johnson. Art as the Alterity of the Imaginary.
Yeditepe University, TurkeyAccording to Bataille; “For Levinas art is one of the ways of the there is. Art ‘tears objects away from the world’…” It is not obvious what Bataille or Levinas mean by ‘the world’, therefore we might tend to understand this ‘world’ as where objects retain their objecthood and are related to by subjects accordingly. Art, like the there is, is proposed as that which provides us with spaces where object and subject positions are suspended. The inverse intentionality of the space of art, in resembling the unintentionality of the space of ‘there is’ work through a certain kind of disinterestedness. The Levinasian aesthetic therefore - in “tearing objects away from the world” - can be argued to create another limit between the world and the space of art –the other world- and suggest the aesthetic phenomenon as an experience of the limit and the experience of the work of art as a possibility of impossibility. This paper discusses Levinasian aesthetics in terms of imaginary spaces of art.