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Machines intimes : de Baudelaire à Barthes (en passant par Proust et Bataille)
Series: - Faux Titre Online, Volume: 471
- Faux Titre, Volume: 471
Author:
Le retour spectaculaire du refoulé est l’un des déterminants du rythme particulier de la modernité. La machine y a aussi sa part. Quand les désirs et les peurs liés à la machine, abandonnés, silencieux, cachés derrière le voile du progrès, émergent, ils créent une sorte de phénoménologie de la machine, qui pendant de nombreuses décennies constitue un point de référence pour des activités littéraires et artistiques. La machine s’y trouve, pour ainsi dire, intériorisée ; inextricablement liée aux affects et aux désirs, elle devient ce que je me propose d’appeler machine intime. Ce processus est étudié ici à travers les œuvres de Baudelaire, Proust, Bataille, Barthes, et quelques autres, dont Roussel, Artaud, Didi-Huberman, ainsi que dans la littérature érotique contemporaine.
The spectacular return of the repressed is one of the determinants of the particular rhythm of modernity. The machine also plays its part. When the desires and fears linked to the machine, abandoned, silent, hidden behind the veil of progress, emerge, they create a kind of phenomenology of the machine, which for many decades constituted a point of reference for literary and artistic activities. The machine is, so to speak, interiorised; inextricably linked to affects and desires, it becomes what I propose to call an intimate machine. This process is explored here through the works of Baudelaire, Proust, Bataille, Barthes and others, including Roussel, Artaud and Didi-Huberman, as well as in contemporary erotic literature.
The spectacular return of the repressed is one of the determinants of the particular rhythm of modernity. The machine also plays its part. When the desires and fears linked to the machine, abandoned, silent, hidden behind the veil of progress, emerge, they create a kind of phenomenology of the machine, which for many decades constituted a point of reference for literary and artistic activities. The machine is, so to speak, interiorised; inextricably linked to affects and desires, it becomes what I propose to call an intimate machine. This process is explored here through the works of Baudelaire, Proust, Bataille, Barthes and others, including Roussel, Artaud and Didi-Huberman, as well as in contemporary erotic literature.
Essayiste et traducteur, Tomasz Swoboda enseigne à la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Gdansk. Il est l’auteur d’ouvrages consacrés à l’art et la littérature, en polonais (thèse sur la littérature décadente, 2003 ; recueils d’essais sur la traduction, sur l’idée de la déformation dans la modernité) et en français (Histoires de l’œil, Rodopi, 2013). Il a traduit en polonais, entre autres, des œuvres de Rousseau, Baudelaire, Nerval, Proust, Barthes, Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Ricœur, Didi-Huberman, Mouawad, Le Corbusier ainsi que la série BD Ariol.
Essayist and translator, Tomasz Swoboda teaches literature (Polish, Spanish, French and Francophone), translation, and performing arts in the Faculty of Languages at the University of Gdansk. He is the author of works devoted to art and literature, in Polish (doctoral thesis on decadent literature, 2003; collections of essays on translation) and in French (Histoires de l’œil, Rodopi, 2013). He has translated into Polish, among others, works by Proust, Baudelaire, Nerval, Barthes, Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Ricœur, Didi-Huberman, Mouawad, Le Corbusier, La Bible by Serge Bloch and Frédéric Boyer as well as the Ariol comics series
Essayist and translator, Tomasz Swoboda teaches literature (Polish, Spanish, French and Francophone), translation, and performing arts in the Faculty of Languages at the University of Gdansk. He is the author of works devoted to art and literature, in Polish (doctoral thesis on decadent literature, 2003; collections of essays on translation) and in French (Histoires de l’œil, Rodopi, 2013). He has translated into Polish, among others, works by Proust, Baudelaire, Nerval, Barthes, Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Ricœur, Didi-Huberman, Mouawad, Le Corbusier, La Bible by Serge Bloch and Frédéric Boyer as well as the Ariol comics series
List of Figures and Tables
Abbreviations
Introduction: “Do You Bring a Sign of Some War, Or …?” (463 BCE)
1 Terrors of the Sign
2 Pindar’s Terrifying Eclipse
3 Divining Disaster
4 “What Is Disaster?”
5 The Ecocritical Perspective
6 Agency, Vulnerability, and Resilience
7 Uncertainty
8 An Ancient Greek Mentality
9 A Comparative Perspective
10 Structure and Organization of the Book
Introduction to Part 1
1 Ancient Divination
1 Chian Catastrophe
2 Delian Disaster
3 “The Theology of the Age”
4 Defining Divination
5 A Cognitive Turn
6 Zeichenbeobachtung
2 Classifying the Sign
1 Peirce’s Triadic Sign
2 A Divinatory Paradigm
3 Basic Sign Classifications
4 Natural vs. Technical Divination
5 Interpreting the Sign
6 “I Opened Their Eyes to the Signs”
3 Naming the Sign
1 Tzetzes’ Terminology
2 Sēma and Sēmainō
3 Teras: Signs and Monsters
4 Teras: Thunder, Snakes, and Rainbows
5 Teras: Monsters and Monstrous Babies
6 From Teras to Tekmar: A Cognitive Perspective
7 Tekmar: Plotting Paths
8 Tekmar: “Conjecture the Invisible”
9 Tekmērion: Toward a Secular Semiotics
4 Abductive Reasoning
1 “We Must Conquer the Truth by Guessing”
2 The Divinatory Sign in Action: Chios Revisited
3 The Divinatory Sign in Action: Delos Revisited
4 The Divinatory Sign in Action: Monster at the Mysteries
5 Codes, Conditionals, and Compendia
6 Signs and Causes: Soft and Hard Astrology
7 Divining Disaster with the Stars: From Hesiod to Berossus
8 Divining Disaster with the Stars: Chaldeans and Egyptians
9 Divining Disaster with the Stars: Ptolemy
Introduction to Part 2
5 Three Modes of Disaster: Plutarch, Shakespeare, Derrida
1 A Neologism in Hamlet
2 Disaster-as-Sign: Shakespeare’s Reception of Plutarch
3 Disaster-as-Condition: Edmund the Bastard
4 Disaster-as-Event and Derrida’s Événement
5 Verticality, Apocalypse, and Le Ciel Désastré
6 Translating Ancient Disaster
1 Un Mot Chaldaique
2 Theseus’ Advice
3 Breaking the Stalk, Felling the Crops
4 Accidental and Violent Fallings
5 The Semantic Field of Disaster in Ancient Greek
6 Military Disaster Lexicon: Sicily and Chaeronea
7 Military Disaster Lexicon: Cannae
8 Categories of Disaster
7 Staging Disaster in Tragedy and History
1 Remembering Disaster
2 Thucydides’ Disaster List
3 Divining Disaster on Stage: Darius
4 Divining Disaster on Stage: Heracles
5 Disasters in the Sun
6 Polybius on Pity and Folly
Introduction to Part 3
8 The Sunken City of Helike
1 Spectacle of Absence
2 Divining the Helike Disaster: Scrofani
3 Helike’s Ancient Testimony
4 “The God Is Wont to Send Signs”
5 Interpreting the Helike Disaster: Religion vs Science
6 Divining the Helike Disaster: Aelian
7 Hermeneutic Disaster Management
9 Moral Agency and Punitive Disaster
1 Agency Reconsidered
2 From Angry Poseidon to Bessie’s Hurricane
3 Punishment, or “A Blessing in Disguise”
4 Acts of Nature, Acts of God
5 Helike Revisited: Anger and Survival
6 Helike Revisited: Signs and Meaning
10 Poseidon’s Disaster Agency
1 Signs, Symbols, Myth
2 “God of Brute Force”
3 Poseidon’s Mode of Action
4 Breaking Open the Earth
5 Leveling the Achaean Wall
6 Covering with Mountains: Phaeacia and Polybotes
7 Rooting the Phaeacian Ship
8 Immobilizing Alcathoos
9 Divining Disaster: Alcinous
10 Divining Disaster: Polyphemus
Introduction to Part 4
11 Imagining Disaster aboard The Poseidon
1 From New York to Athens
2 “We’ve Turned Over”: Imagining Disaster
3 “Robinson Crusoe on a World-Wide Scale”
4 The Banality of Disaster
5 “There Were No Landmarks”
12 The Disaster Geography of the Argonauts
1 Finding the Way Out
2 Rocks and Currents
3 “In the Grip of Perfect Calm”
4 Divining Disaster: Restoring Sights and Sounds
5 Divining Disaster: Decoding the Sign
6 The Black Emptiness of Katoulas
7 The Sibyl Divines Disaster
8 Vesuvius, Giants, and Cosmic Disaster
13 Negative Cosmology: Titans, Typhoeus, and Tartarus
1 Soundscapes of Divine and Human Strife
2 Crashing Gaia and Cosmic Conflagration
3 Typhoeus and Athena
4 Typhoeus as Cosmic Teras
5 The Disastered State of Tartarus
14 Bound and Adrift: Prometheus, Io, and the Island of Delos
1 Hesiod’s mega pēma: Erratic Winds
2 Hesiod’s mega pēma: Coma and Exile
3 God in Exile
4 Prometheus Bound, Io Adrift
5 “Tangled in Disaster’s Endless Net”
6 The Floating Island
7 The Polysemy of Delos
8 The Mobility of Delos: akinēton teras
9 Home to Octopuses and Seals
10 Divining Disaster: An Island and an Oracle
Introduction to Part 5
15 The Plague as Semiotic Monster
1 Dr. Fauci Goes to Marseille
2 The Bees of Aristaeus
3 The Disaster Triad
4 Disaster in Hesiod’s Wicked City
5 Sterility and Strife
6 Divining Disasters with Monsters: The Sphinx and the Kētos
7 Divining Disasters with Monsters: The Minotaur
8 A Typology of the Monstrous
16 Oracles and Plague in Historical Narrative
1 Divining Loimos and Oracular Divination
2 Herodotus: Loimos for the Chians
3 Herodotus: Loimos for the Cretans and Persians
4 David’s Dilemma: Plague, Famine, or War?
5 Josephus’ Plague-as-Plague
6 Divining Disaster: David and Epimenides
7 Curing the Plague: From Abaris to Hippocrates
8 Thucydides Divines Disaster
Conclusion: “A Strange Stillness” (1962)
1 Andrà Tutto Bene
2 Divining Disaster for the Modern Ecocritic
3 The longue durée of Disaster Discourse
Bibliography
Index
Abbreviations
Introduction: “Do You Bring a Sign of Some War, Or …?” (463 BCE)
1 Terrors of the Sign
2 Pindar’s Terrifying Eclipse
3 Divining Disaster
4 “What Is Disaster?”
5 The Ecocritical Perspective
6 Agency, Vulnerability, and Resilience
7 Uncertainty
8 An Ancient Greek Mentality
9 A Comparative Perspective
10 Structure and Organization of the Book
Part 1 Divination and Semiotics: “Those Were the Signs” (494 BCE)
Introduction to Part 1
1 Ancient Divination
1 Chian Catastrophe
2 Delian Disaster
3 “The Theology of the Age”
4 Defining Divination
5 A Cognitive Turn
6 Zeichenbeobachtung
2 Classifying the Sign
1 Peirce’s Triadic Sign
2 A Divinatory Paradigm
3 Basic Sign Classifications
4 Natural vs. Technical Divination
5 Interpreting the Sign
6 “I Opened Their Eyes to the Signs”
3 Naming the Sign
1 Tzetzes’ Terminology
2 Sēma and Sēmainō
3 Teras: Signs and Monsters
4 Teras: Thunder, Snakes, and Rainbows
5 Teras: Monsters and Monstrous Babies
6 From Teras to Tekmar: A Cognitive Perspective
7 Tekmar: Plotting Paths
8 Tekmar: “Conjecture the Invisible”
9 Tekmērion: Toward a Secular Semiotics
4 Abductive Reasoning
1 “We Must Conquer the Truth by Guessing”
2 The Divinatory Sign in Action: Chios Revisited
3 The Divinatory Sign in Action: Delos Revisited
4 The Divinatory Sign in Action: Monster at the Mysteries
5 Codes, Conditionals, and Compendia
6 Signs and Causes: Soft and Hard Astrology
7 Divining Disaster with the Stars: From Hesiod to Berossus
8 Divining Disaster with the Stars: Chaldeans and Egyptians
9 Divining Disaster with the Stars: Ptolemy
Part 2 Disasters and Definitions: “Disasters in the Sun” (1601)
Introduction to Part 2
5 Three Modes of Disaster: Plutarch, Shakespeare, Derrida
1 A Neologism in Hamlet
2 Disaster-as-Sign: Shakespeare’s Reception of Plutarch
3 Disaster-as-Condition: Edmund the Bastard
4 Disaster-as-Event and Derrida’s Événement
5 Verticality, Apocalypse, and Le Ciel Désastré
6 Translating Ancient Disaster
1 Un Mot Chaldaique
2 Theseus’ Advice
3 Breaking the Stalk, Felling the Crops
4 Accidental and Violent Fallings
5 The Semantic Field of Disaster in Ancient Greek
6 Military Disaster Lexicon: Sicily and Chaeronea
7 Military Disaster Lexicon: Cannae
8 Categories of Disaster
7 Staging Disaster in Tragedy and History
1 Remembering Disaster
2 Thucydides’ Disaster List
3 Divining Disaster on Stage: Darius
4 Divining Disaster on Stage: Heracles
5 Disasters in the Sun
6 Polybius on Pity and Folly
Part 3 Agency and Punishment: “How Can I Have Lunch?” (1799)
Introduction to Part 3
8 The Sunken City of Helike
1 Spectacle of Absence
2 Divining the Helike Disaster: Scrofani
3 Helike’s Ancient Testimony
4 “The God Is Wont to Send Signs”
5 Interpreting the Helike Disaster: Religion vs Science
6 Divining the Helike Disaster: Aelian
7 Hermeneutic Disaster Management
9 Moral Agency and Punitive Disaster
1 Agency Reconsidered
2 From Angry Poseidon to Bessie’s Hurricane
3 Punishment, or “A Blessing in Disguise”
4 Acts of Nature, Acts of God
5 Helike Revisited: Anger and Survival
6 Helike Revisited: Signs and Meaning
10 Poseidon’s Disaster Agency
1 Signs, Symbols, Myth
2 “God of Brute Force”
3 Poseidon’s Mode of Action
4 Breaking Open the Earth
5 Leveling the Achaean Wall
6 Covering with Mountains: Phaeacia and Polybotes
7 Rooting the Phaeacian Ship
8 Immobilizing Alcathoos
9 Divining Disaster: Alcinous
10 Divining Disaster: Polyphemus
Part 4 Uncertainty and Suffering: “Hell, Upside Down” (1971)
Introduction to Part 4
11 Imagining Disaster aboard The Poseidon
1 From New York to Athens
2 “We’ve Turned Over”: Imagining Disaster
3 “Robinson Crusoe on a World-Wide Scale”
4 The Banality of Disaster
5 “There Were No Landmarks”
12 The Disaster Geography of the Argonauts
1 Finding the Way Out
2 Rocks and Currents
3 “In the Grip of Perfect Calm”
4 Divining Disaster: Restoring Sights and Sounds
5 Divining Disaster: Decoding the Sign
6 The Black Emptiness of Katoulas
7 The Sibyl Divines Disaster
8 Vesuvius, Giants, and Cosmic Disaster
13 Negative Cosmology: Titans, Typhoeus, and Tartarus
1 Soundscapes of Divine and Human Strife
2 Crashing Gaia and Cosmic Conflagration
3 Typhoeus and Athena
4 Typhoeus as Cosmic Teras
5 The Disastered State of Tartarus
14 Bound and Adrift: Prometheus, Io, and the Island of Delos
1 Hesiod’s mega pēma: Erratic Winds
2 Hesiod’s mega pēma: Coma and Exile
3 God in Exile
4 Prometheus Bound, Io Adrift
5 “Tangled in Disaster’s Endless Net”
6 The Floating Island
7 The Polysemy of Delos
8 The Mobility of Delos: akinēton teras
9 Home to Octopuses and Seals
10 Divining Disaster: An Island and an Oracle
Part 5 Vulnerability and Contagion: “A Protean Disease” (2020)
Introduction to Part 5
15 The Plague as Semiotic Monster
1 Dr. Fauci Goes to Marseille
2 The Bees of Aristaeus
3 The Disaster Triad
4 Disaster in Hesiod’s Wicked City
5 Sterility and Strife
6 Divining Disasters with Monsters: The Sphinx and the Kētos
7 Divining Disasters with Monsters: The Minotaur
8 A Typology of the Monstrous
16 Oracles and Plague in Historical Narrative
1 Divining Loimos and Oracular Divination
2 Herodotus: Loimos for the Chians
3 Herodotus: Loimos for the Cretans and Persians
4 David’s Dilemma: Plague, Famine, or War?
5 Josephus’ Plague-as-Plague
6 Divining Disaster: David and Epimenides
7 Curing the Plague: From Abaris to Hippocrates
8 Thucydides Divines Disaster
Conclusion: “A Strange Stillness” (1962)
1 Andrà Tutto Bene
2 Divining Disaster for the Modern Ecocritic
3 The longue durée of Disaster Discourse
Bibliography
Index
researchers and students of French literature