Articles
Into the Forge
Daniel Heller-Roazen
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Pythagoras knew not to trust his ears. Sage and scientist, he understood that such organs of perception might well reveal the truth. But he was also aware that they might lead him into error. As Boethius relates in Institutions of Music, Pythagoras "put no credence in them," since the ears, being bodily parts like all others, are subject to incessant change. Sometimes they vary on account of external and accidental circumstances; sometimes they begin to differ by necessity, as when they age. Pythagoras could hardly have expected more from acoustical devices made by men. Musical instruments were, for him, "sources of much variability and inconstancy" ("FM," 18; TM, 46–47). More than once, he had studied the nature of strings. Their tones may change for reasons almost too numerous to enumerate. Depending on their matter, depending on their length and width, depending on the air about them and the force with which one plucks them, cords will inevitably produce different noises. Pythagoras had observed that other instruments are of a like nature. The sole certainty about them is that, sooner or later, they must abandon "the state of their previous stability" ("FM," 17), causing their tones to change perceptibly. In awareness of the implications of these facts, Pythagoras had resolved to liberate himself and his investigations, as much as he could, from the troubling consequences of sensible things. He would study the laws of sound without needing to encounter them in bodily form, and he would acquire knowledge of the properties of audible things by the aid of reason alone.
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The Sorrow of Being
Nicola Masciandaro
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Sorrow is double. The doubleness of sorrow is more than its manifestation, like everything else subject to duality, in alternate forms of good and bad, pleasurable and painful, healthy and unhealthy, and so forth. Rather, it has to do with a deeper ambivalence within the structure and experience of sorrow itself, such that the task of defining sorrow seems inherently to demand distinguishing between opposite forms of sorrow. Sorrow is never simply good or bad, but always good or bad in a way that involves the possibility of its opposite. This doubleness is especially evident within the medieval discourse on sorrow, which, rooted in St. Paul's distinction in 2 Corinthians 7:10 between tristitia secundum Deum (sorrow according to God) and tristitia saeculi (worldly sorrow), both celebrates sorrow as a spiritual virtue and obsesses over its dangers to a degree that modernity does not. Where modernity views sorrow by and large as a problem to be fixed, even as premodern, and/or the inverse, as its own general condition, medieval culture typically understood sorrow as a task to be faced, a work of mourning to be taken up, and therefore also a labor under which one could not only collapse, but fail.
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The Death of Freud: What Is to Be Preferred, Death or Obsolescence?
Jean-Michel Rabaté
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If the rhetorical question of my subtitle merely rephrases Achilles' choice, I would like to argue, however, that the question is not only a rhetorical one. It is not a rhetorical question for Freud and those who call themselves "Freudian." As we know, the goddess Thetis would have wished that her son lived a long and uneventful life; instead, Achilles opted for a short but illustrious life. Even though this was not exactly Freud's problem, since he lived a long and eventful life, it may have become our problem today, especially when we are confronted with what has been announced more than once either as "the death of Freud" or as the "death of psychoanalysis." My main argument here leads to the contention that it is a mistake to speak of the "death of psychoanalysis," since what is at stake is its obsolescence and the various forms it has taken. In such a mythological or classical context, death keeps its heroic aura, whereas obsolescence calls up images of slow degradation, of sporadic decay and increasing technical malfunction. Indeed, since I have referred to Thetis and Achilles, I am reminded that Western culture is full of hapless people who obtained immortality but forgot to request eternal youth as well. The best-known figure is the Sybil, a character who was added at the last minute to provide a neat neoclassical Greco-Latin epigraph to Eliot's Waste Land. Given a voice via Petronius, the Sybil only repeats "apothanein thelô," I want to die.
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There Is No Acoustic Relation: Considerations on Sound and Image in Post-Soviet Film
Lilya Kaganovsky
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Kira Muratova's 1992 film, Chuvstvitel'nyi militsioner (The Sentimental Policeman), opens with a close-up of a baby's face. The baby (Natasha) is lying in a purple and green cabbage patch, occasionally illuminated by a passing searchlight. Nearby, a policeman (the "sentimental policeman" of the title) is playing with a broken doll. Suddenly, as we see the mouth of the baby become contorted in what we assume to be crying, the policeman jumps up and begins to perform a series of theatrical movements: he spins around, he covers his ears, he dances in circles, and we understand from this exaggerated gestural language that he can hear the baby crying, even if we can't. Indeed, since the opening close-up of the baby's face, we have been hearing sound, but that sound has been insistently extra-diegetic: the twelfth piece in Tchaikovsky's piano suite The Seasons, titled "Sviatki" (Noël/Christmas). Only at the point when the sentimental policeman actually finds the baby and both of them occupy the same frame does the film switch from the extra-diegetic music to synchronized sound: finally, as he leans over the baby, we hear her cry.
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Absent Blue Wax (Rationalist Empiricism)
Nathan Brown
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What is an "exemplary exception"? This would not be an exception that proves the rule—that merely refers us back to the rule's existence—nor would it be an exception that disproves the rule—in the manner, let's say, that the incest prohibition deconstructs a binary opposition between nature and culture. Rather, an exemplary exception (in philosophy) would be an exception that exemplifies the positive power of a system of thought to intuit its outside from within its own parameters, while retaining the sense of that outside as a real exception: to encounter an outside within the movement of thought, without thereby either absorbing or collapsing into it. An exemplary exception inhabits an extra-systemic yet intra-philosophical space, a space exterior and open insofar as unbounded by an envelope of conceptual systematicity, yet nevertheless determined in its contours by the edges of those philosophical systems that generate exceptions—that produce exteriorities precisely by constituting a field of internal coherence. It is within such a structured yet exterior space that I want to situate what I call rationalist empiricism.
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The Face of Time between Haeckel and Bergson; or, Toward an Ethics of Impure Vision
Scott Ferguson
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This essay stages an encounter, a speculative tête-à-tête, between two of the more notorious figures from the history of modern evolutionary thought: the ever-controversial German zoologist Ernst Haeckel and the comparatively better-received French philosopher Henri Bergson. Though they hail from relatively distinct—however overlapping—national, intellectual, and historical milieus, Haeckel and Bergson shared many theoretical concerns and radicalized late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century evolutionism in surprisingly similar ways. Both were unsatisfied, for instance, with solely mechanistic explanations of evolutionary change, including Darwin's theory of natural selection, which privileged efficient causes between external phenomena in conceptualizing environs as evolutionary sieves. Neither Haeckel nor Bergson rejected the idea of natural selection, but each also sought an immanent cause for the history of life in the form of a generative temporality that would spur life's movements from within. Moreover, each grounded his idea in an explicitly non-teleological, non-deterministic understanding of repetition. Haeckel's divisive theory of "recapitulation" saw evolutionary repetition as generative in and for itself, whereas Bergson thought repetition a largely passive effect of the interplay between matter's finitude and the infinity of la durée pure, or "pure duration." Nonetheless, for both thinkers, repetition comprised a diversifying, cumulative movement that served as an autopoietic source for the radiating history of life Darwin described in On the Origin of Species (1859).
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The Pleasures of Infanticide
Jacques Lezra
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A child is being beaten. I overhear something, or maybe I witness it. On the other side of the wall the scene unfolds in private: an adult, perhaps a father or a mother, and a child, a boy or a girl. On this side of the wall, another private scene—a debate I hold with myself. What am I hearing? (I must first be able to interpret the sounds I hear, or the marks I see.) Do I intervene or not? What do I need to know in order to step in, or in order to decide not to? What tools does my judgment require? What are the practical bases on which the knowledge required for moral decisions stands?
My scene is highly theatrical, but it is the theater that I will be discussing, for reasons I'll hope to make clear. It's also, despite the broad strokes and the troublingly common circumstances it describes, a specifically early-modern scene that I intend. Consider this a primarily disciplinary observation. It concerns the way in which we approach what might be called the study of (the genealogy of) decisions, in the ethical as well as the epistemological field. Say we ask the question, On what grounds were decisions taken, in the period of early modernity? Every term would require qualification, nuance, circumstance.
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Review Essays
Art without Culture
Alex Benson
A review of Braddock, Alan C., Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
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Rhetoric, Class, and Christ
Vincent Lloyd
A review of Žižek, Slavoj and Milbank, John, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? edited by Davis, Creston (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
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On the Cognitive Turn in Literary Studies
Michelle Ty
A review of Dehaene, Stanislas, Reading in the Brain (New York: Viking Press, 2009); Massey, Irving, The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); and Vermule, Blakey, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
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Cover: Iannis Xenakis, Study for Terretektorh, c. 1965–66. More info.
Volume 19.1 is available at Duke University Press, Project Muse, and JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.