Duncan McColl Chesney

In this paper, by a focus on the representation of Michael K as a figure of silence in Life & Times of Michael K, I attempt to draw out J. M. Coetzee's assertion of a fundamental ethico-political aporia. This aporia, which derives in contemporary theory from Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot's separate work on Emmanuel Levinas and expresses the constitutive gap between any given politics and individual ethical responsibility, is developed in somewhat different terms by Giorgio Agamben, upon whose reading of Herman Melville's character Bartleby I model my understanding of Michael K. The account of Bartleby as a figure of potentiality offered by Agamben provides both an intriguing explanation of Michael K's curious irrecuperability as well as a possible prospective (utopian), euporic resolution of the antinomy that K embodies in a thinking of a "coming community." Through this reading I seek to address a misunderstanding I find in much criticism of Coetzee's novel regarding its "political" shortcomings. I then conclude with a suggestion about what Life & Times of Michael K, and Coetzee's work in general, teaches or reminds us about literature.

In the spirit of the stated topic, “Angel of the New,” this article addresses the question of the modern—in art, politics, and social thought—in terms deriving from Benjamin’s, and subsequently Adorno’s, experience of art in its fullest truth claims in the face of catastrophe. The article explores a certain contemporary questioning of the limits of representation and the truth-value of representations, above all art works. Making reference to Agamben and the notion of “bare life” as a key figure of modern bio-politics, it addresses several contemporary issues at the limits of aesthetic, conceptual, and political “representation” (though shying away from a full engagement with contemporary political theory proper and its concerns): death, the sublime, catastrophe. Beginning with modern changes in the understanding of death (and life) and the role of technology, instrumental rational control, and economic reason, in the formation of modern society, it discusses the catastrophic limit cases of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, arguing ultimately that a modernist commitment to art truth, even with respect to the most difficult human events, is necessary still today, despite a seeming movement beyond the modern in the reigning cultural dominant.

This paper stages readings of several fictional and non-fictional explorations of the relation of man and animal, of limits, obligations, and sympathy, as well as larger ecological questions around creatureliness and planetarity. I argue for reassessment, via Agamben’s by now familiar gloss on Heidegger’s discussion of the animal, of an ineradicable creatureliness internal to the human, and then show what coming to terms with this means more broadly in ethical life. Finally, I insist on the role of fiction in the training of the imagination, a priming for the sort of ethical experience essential to good or right life.

A groundbreaking work in the theorization of cinema, Gilles Deleuze's Cinema project embraces an original conceptual terminology in order to express the complexity of the world of moving images. A philosopher and cinephile, but avowedly not a film scholar, Deleuze offers an innovative philosophical approach to cinema's ability to reflect on our world as well as its ability to transform human modes of thought and expression. The film books (1983, 1985; trans. 1986, 1989) are an extraordinary attempt to see the cinema differently, through a Bergsonian–Nietzschean lens, and thus to learn from the cinema what it does and has done for twentieth-century thought – for philosophy, but also for art and political thought. From a similar passion for cinema and a devotion to the philosophy of art, Jacques Rancière works from Deleuze's general premise, taking the French philosophy of cinema in a direction founded upon a different set of theoretical principles. Engaging directly with Deleuze's work, Rancière seeks to historicize and to understand both the cinema in general, and Deleuze's work on the cinema. Although Deleuze did not live to engage in turn with Rancière's criticism, a critical dialogue between the two thinkers' works around the cinema would be a fertile example of the French philosophy of cinema, not only touching on philosophy's relationship to or use of the cinema, but also revealing, through the cinema, an ongoing debate in philosophy (admittedly, as old as Parmenides and the original questioning of the unity or multiplicity of substance).

The article traces a rhetorical relationship between William Faulkner’s prose style in Absalom, Absalom! and the language of William Shakespeare’s tragic period, epitomized in Hamlet, through the trope of hendiadys—one through two—and other figures of coupling, doubling, and yoking. The major claim is that Shakespeare gives to the English language a particular, contorted form of expression in his great tragic works that subsequent writers, preeminently Faulkner, adopt willy-nilly when confronting the primal and conflictual bases of tragic predicaments. In Faulkner’s case, the racial and sexual crimes and tensions at the heart of his region’s history are expressed in his most brilliant and contorted text through an unusual use of figures of doubling that has not attracted proper critical attention to date. The article addresses this lack, and speculates about the nature of tragedy itself and its necessarily difficult expression in any language or literary tradition.

The paper approaches the question of global literature and its putative public by reviewing some of the major debates about world literature (Damrosch; Spivak; Casanova; Moretti) and focusing on the contribution of Alexander Beecroft and his notion of literary ecologies. The institutions officially and unofficially governing the world republic of letters (publishing houses, literary prizes, and so forth) are briefly reviewed and criticized (following Parks; Owen; Coletti). I then address the “global literary ecology” by looking at a few recent examples from Africa, first that of J. M. Coetzee, and then briefly that of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, as well as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in order to question the viability or desirability of the de facto Anglophone hegemony in the world republic of letters. I conclude by rehearsing the position more or less against global literature (with Spivak and Apter) and for a renewed philology and multilingualism in the spirit of Auerbach and Said.