qui
parle

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Creaturely life is a life that is in excess of both biological life and our life in the space of meaning, between––but in excess of––both instinct and symbol; creatureliness denotes life as determined by the drives rather than by emotions, feelings, instincts, or ideas. Although primarily a concept intended to capture a particular possibility and deformation of human experience, in the writings of W. G. Sebald creaturely life is most perspicuously presented in images of animals who have lost their natural place, lost the possibility of living an animal life in becoming subject to the demands of culture, subject to forces beyond their control––culture become force. At the very beginning of Austerlitz, the narrator recalls visiting the newly opened Antwerp Nocturama and watching a raccoon sitting beside a little stream "with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing . . . would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own."

Read now at Duke University Press

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Since the onset of modernity, as part of the Enlightenment's self representation of Western culture, artistic creation and the human imagination have been linked to positive emancipatory forces. Yet if we look back to what precisely the modern "invention of tradition" recovers as the first work of fiction, Greek tragedy, we find that the Western self takes as its first self-representation, paradoxically, the denial of the human ability to act: although tragic heroes such as Agamemnon or Eteocles try to take action, their decisions and acts recoil against them with fatal results. Their initiative is usurped and reversed by an external force, fate, that provokes their death. Thus it would seem that the human imagination simultaneously enables and thwarts agency. It does so by producing destructive inventions, such as tragic fate, which in spite of being themselves created within an artwork––a work of fiction––radically contradict the human capacity for action. This is astonishing. Should we conclude from this that the imagination denies itself?

Read now at Duke University Press

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, the aptly named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) discloses to his therapist the now-infamous words: "I see dead people." Only at the end of the film does Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), the child psychologist to whom Cole confides, finally realize the full implications of what his patient has been trying to tell him: that Crowe is one of these dead people who has trespassed the supposedly unbridgeable barrier between the living and the dead. The declaration "I see dead people" thus implies Crowe's death as the condition of its veracity. How could the psychologist not see, as it were, the possibility that “I see dead people" means "because I see you, because I look at you and tell you this, you, therefore, are dead"? Cole's words must therefore induce Crowe to a certain blindness––a disavowal that the film requires of the spectator by extension––in order for this "surprise" revelation to work. The film counts on the blindness of the spectator to the possibility that his or her own death is presumed by the child's revelation. Insofar as the film urges us to see (or not to see) through the eyes of Malcolm Crowe, we are permitted to pass through the province of the spectral, at least until we leave the theater to return to the world of the living, reassured of our self-presence.

Read now at Duke University Press

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Curatorial Note

Since the 1970s the art of Hanaa Malallah has borne witness to the ongoing catastrophes that have befallen Baghdad. The most recent of these: a war with Iran encouraged by the American bloc, then a war by the American bloc itself, followed by a decade of sanctions authored by the Clinton administration that brought as much if not more devastation to Iraq as the war launched by the Bush ad ministration in 2003. Efforts to give form not only to the damage suffered by the city in which she lived but also to the collateral disfigurement of its aesthetic tradition, her works are themselves, in her words, "ruins," "piles of forms." On the cover of this issue appears an image of Iraq, New Map/US Map, in which Malallah reconstructs a cartography of Iraq with pieces of scorched paper, some of these fragments of faded maps of varying scale, joined by restorative applications of paint. For Malallah, this is the cartog raphy that results from the American re-mapping of Iraq, the map of a "New Middle East" in which orientation is no longer possible.

Read now at Duke University Press

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Contemporary neurobiological research is engaged in a deep redefinition of emotional life: the brain, far from being a nonsensuous organ, one devoted only to logical and cognitive processes, now appears on the contrary to be the center of what we may call a new libidinal economy. A new conception of affects is undoubtedly emerging.

The general issue I would like to address here is the following: Does the neurobiological approach to affect accomplish a material and radical deconstruction of subjectivity? I mean: Does neuroscience engage in a more material and radical deconstruction of subjectivity than the one led by deconstruction itself? Does this approach help us to think of affects outside the classical conception of auto-affection, of affects that would not proceed from a primary auto-affection of the subject? Does the study of the emotional brain challenge the vision of a self-affecting subjectivity in favor of a hetero-affected one?

Read now at Duke University Press

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

If the radical moment of the inauguration of modern philosophy is the rise of the Cartesian cogito, where are we today with regard to cogito? Are we really entering a post-Cartesian era, or is it that only now our unique historical constellation enables us to discern all the consequences of the cogito? Walter Benjamin claimed that works of art often function like shots taken on film for which the developer has not yet been discovered, so that one has to wait for the future to understand them properly. Is not something similar happening with cogito: today, we have at our disposal the developer to understand it properly.

In what, then, does this developer consist? What makes our historical moment unique?

Read now at Duke University Press

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

        Two babies are feeding at the breast. One is feeding on the self, since the breast and the baby have not yet become ... separate phenomena. The other is feeding from an other-than-me source.

        Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality

Play is almost synonymous with deconstructive thought. The inaugural text of deconstruction in America is Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." The importance of play in Nietzsche's thought needs no rehearsal. For Heidegger too, play is essential––think of the play of the fourfold, which is part of my topic here. In psychoanalysis play has several obvious resonances. Melanie Klein invented play therapy for chil dren. Donald Winnicott is the great theoretician of play. The fort/da scene is a scene of play.

Read now at Duke University Press

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The following dialogue developed as a conversation with the Japanese translators of my book, The Legend of Freud (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), Takashi Minatomichi and Yuki Maeda, who suggested that I provide an introduction to their translation. I asked them if it might not be more interesting for us to engage in a dialogue based on their experiences in translating the book. I also asked if they might provide me with a brief review of the history of psychoanalysis in Japan, so that I would have some context in which to respond to their questions and other remarks. This they did, and the result is a dialogue that was conducted in English, for my part, and in French for theirs. Since a text always involves some sort of dialogue with its readers, my hope was that this would be the best possible introduction of the book to Japanese readers. I hope that our conversation will prove of interest to English-speaking readers as well, however different the universes of discourse may be.

Samuel Weber

Read now at Duke University Press