USD $139.00
Browse results
Page:12
Editor:
In Literature and the Encounter with Immanence Brynnar Swenson collects nine original essays that approach the relationship between literature and immanence through methodologies grounded in the philosophy of Spinoza. One of Spinoza’s most provocative claims is a simple declaration of ignorance: “We do not know what a body can do.” A literary theory based on immanence privileges the ontological status of the text and the material act of reading. Rather than ask what a text means, the essays here ask what a text can do. Each essay documents a distinct literary and philosophical encounter with immanence and, as a result, opens up a space to read literature as one would read philosophy and vice versa.
Editor:
In Literature and the Encounter with Immanence Brynnar Swenson collects nine original essays that approach the relationship between literature and immanence through methodologies grounded in the philosophy of Spinoza. One of Spinoza’s most provocative claims is a simple declaration of ignorance: “We do not know what a body can do.” A literary theory based on immanence privileges the ontological status of the text and the material act of reading. Rather than ask what a text means, the essays here ask what a text can do. Each essay documents a distinct literary and philosophical encounter with immanence and, as a result, opens up a space to read literature as one would read philosophy and vice versa.
Abstract: This essay argues that Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day documents a rupture and crisis within American capitalism prior to the First World War and reveals its effects on the labor movement’s struggle in the West. Using a schizoanalytic methodology, we analyze how the novel presents, and then disrupts and contests, the Oedipal/theatrical enclosure of the nuclear family. Revealing the dominant concept of the family as a myth and tragedy, we outline how the novel reveals a web of familial relations and resemblances as a series of breaks and contingent encounters that push the limit of representation. As a result, an immanent, or machinic, unconscious is presented as a form of desiring production per se, one that presents the protagonists as interrogatory figures or ‘conceptual personae’ in an alchemical investigation of unanticipated surplus value.
Author:
Abstract: In this essay I read Spinoza’s Ethics, Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” in a way that mimics the tripartite apparatus espoused by the author of the last – Spinoza as author, Borges’ story as text, and Barth as reader. In so doing, I will address the implications of an historically immanent reading that takes seriously the ‘death of the author’ as a transcendent guarantee of meaning while also investigating the way subjectivity remains embedded within the structure of the literary text. This essay ultimately articulates a challenge that these two texts, together, raise for a postmodern reading, one that charts a way out of its own state of ‘exhaustion’.
Author:
Absract: This essay reads the unresolved temporal structures in jr as productive of an immanent form of realism, one that speaks to the shared structural forms through which both aesthetic form and political critique operate. The disjunction and disconnection between two registers of time in the novel corresponds to the contemporary model of communicative labor in which every moment of the day, and every type of labor, is potentially wage labor. I argue that the novel’s formal experiment with time structurally conflates the work of the artist and the work of the ‘organization man’ in such a way as to make the immanent relationship between aesthetic and economic labor visible in the form of the novel.
Author:
Abstract: This essay explores the intimate connection between thought, knowledge, and faith within Muriel Rukeyser’s poetic discourse. I will contend that as both poetry and philosophy have only two materials with which to grapple: language and the perceivable reality it has been developed to represent, there is no way of categorically separating the intentions and directions of philosophy and poetry, let alone their results. However, where philosophy—as Giorgio Agamben has pointed—seeks for language to adhere definitively to meaning, poetry seeks to reveal a space of immanence between the re-presentation of the thing and the thing itself. This is achieved, I will argue, through the exploitation of the gap between objective reality and its representation, a gap that is fundamental to language itself.
Author:
Abstract: In Samuel Delany’s recent utopian science-fiction novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders there is a moment perhaps a third into the book when the narrator, Eric, is given a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics. Eric constantly returns to the book over the next 50 years of his life, puzzling, struggling, and then marveling over its contents as they increasingly become a part of his own narrative arc. The general thematic of Delany’s novel - utopian communities, politics understood as physical relationships, a life in Nature punctuated by mystical experience - can clearly be connected to aspects of Spinoza’s Ethics, but the relation between the two books is more than simply the one illustrating the other. Delany’s book is composed around and through Spinoza’s axiom’s of immanence, actualizing them in an ‘ethical’ narrative that draws on the popular genres of sci-fi, sentimental love story and pornographic novel. Delany explores a ‘plane of immanence’ extending Spinoza’s ethical philosophy into a pornographic love story, without ever abandoning one for the other, and always insisting upon their immanence.
Author:
Abstract: This essay examines Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable through Maurice Blanchot’s concept of radical suffering. Radical suffering is an affective condition that negates the existence of the subject and highlights the unstable quality of subjectivity. Blanchot explains this affective encounter as “suffering such that I could not suffer it,” and Langlois deploys this limit-experience in order to name the paradoxical situation expressed by Beckett’s narrator. This essay articulates a fundamental difference between suffering that is phenomenologically accessible to literary and philosophical critique, and a limit-experience of suffering that inheres in the non-phenomenological space of immanence. Insofar as radical suffering has a narrative presence in The Unnamable, it is a presence that is symptomatic of the ontological configuration of immanence, and one that is constitutive of both literature and narrative form.
Author:
Abstract: This essay argues that Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro is an important literary expression of Spinoza’s philosophy. In making this case I apply Deleuze’s concept of “a voyage in immanence” to bring Spinoza’s Ethics and Caeiro’s poetry into conversation. The qualities of the Ethics that make it a voyage in immanence are also found in Caeiro’s poems. First I read the speculative themes far from human pain and confusion in “The Keeper of Sheep” and then the second quality through accidental encounters, time, doubt, and passions in “The Shepherd in Love” and other poems. The essay locates two distinct moments of intersection with Spinoza, “The Non-Teleological Journey” and “Every Victory is a Defeat” in order to show how Caeiro can be both a celebration and critique of Spinoza’s thought.
Author:
Abstract: This chapter explores the phenomenon of displaced memory in the autobiographical essays of Czesław Miłosz through Spinoza’s conception of immanence. Displaced memory is a remembrance of times and places that are irretrievably lost. It is related to the Spinoza’s logic of immanent causality as it is caused by its own effects. In Miłosz’s essays, any attempt at personal sense-making is only a temporary occurrence as displaced memory is not fixed or autonomous. A reading from the perspective of immanence sheds light on what happens when there is no traditional mode of interpellation to operate ground or structure the narratives of memory. As a result, displaced memory reveals a novel form of affective capacity. Miłosz’s essays reveal how survival rests on the relationship between an affective capacity and an immanent production of memory and meaning.
Page:12