Silence and Intervention
Preface
Katharine Streip and Brian Holmes
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
For graduate students, the allure of the topic "silence
and intervention" perhaps goes without saying. Confronted
by this coupling, we might ruefully identify ourselves with
the first as we exercise voices that assume their sound,
weight and force from the position of "graduate student."
Simultaneously, we might eagerly anticipate a future when
our meliorative efforts attain the distinction of faculty
"interventions."
But to characterize silence and intervention in these
ways simplifies the logic of both. An alternative view might
show silence as a positive expression of resistance, a
powerful force within history. When does silence become
an act of intervention, or intervention, on the contrary, an
instance of numbing silence? How do silence and
intervention work to define both the ethical and the
unspeakable?
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On the Nullity of Abstractions
Sonia Van Ballaert
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The object is oval. It would be a perfect geometrical
figure, an ellipse, if the rim of the object weren't slightly
uneven. The hand which delineated the thing––for it is man
made––may have wavered momentarily as it was tracing the
shape, or it may have trembled as it was cutting the figure
out of its material. In spite of these human hesitations on the
rim of the object, the global shape, the overall impression, is
elliptic. Elliptic ... this word brings to mind the idea of
something left out, of an omission or an incompletion. Yet,
what could be elided in an object which is a work of art,
finished enough to be fixed onto a museum wall?
The object is oval and it is flat. The flatness of the
object brings to mind the two dimensions of a painter's
canvas. The thing in question is indeed a piece of canvas,
hardly anything more, maybe something less. It is an elliptic
cloth covered with yellow paste, yet not crossed by lines, or
filled in with color like a painting. The canvas is not a support for line or for color; the cloth does
not serve as an underground for a painting, be it
representational or abstract. The terms 'design' and 'color,'
'representation' and 'abstraction' do not even hold here; they
seem to slide off the uneven surface of the cloth cluttered
with paint. To say that the object is a painting, either of
something or of the art of painting itself, is to miss the point,
for one may ask, is this object a painting?
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Chaucer’s Maiden's Head: The Physician’s Tale and the Poetics of Virginity
R. Howard Bloch
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It is hard not to be struck in reading Chaucer's
Physician's Tale by the insufficient motivation of this
narrative account of how a virgin named Virginia is espied
by a judge named Appius, who, through the churl Claudius,
brings an indictment against her father Virginius, who, in
turn puts his daughter to death rather than suffer the shame
of her sequestration in Appius's house. Chaucer, or the
narrator, seems not very motivated to begin, for the stultified
moralizing prologue, in which he discusses Nature's
creation of Virginia and the importance of parents'
surveillance of their children, occupies 118 lines, or over
one third of the whole. Once the poet does begin, that
beginning itself participates to such an extent in the quality of
the accidental––the "Once upon a time, it happened"––that
one wonders what the relation between the prologue and the
almost generic narrative start really is: "This mayde upon a
day wente in the toun/ Toward a temple, with hire mooder
deere,/ As is of yonge maydens the manere" (118).
Chaucer is, moreover, so anxious to end The Physician's
Tale that the compressed resuming action is more postulated
than shown: a crowd appears out of nowhere, Appius is
thrown into prison, Claudius is exiled, and everybody else is
hanged––all in ten lines! (267-276).
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Frontiers of Figure: Don Quixote and the Comedia
Brian Holmes
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Coquín, the jester of Calderón's The Physician of
His Honor, is in a tight spot: within a month he must trick
the King into laughing, or have his teeth ripped out of his
mouth. The play ends without resolving this sadistic
subplot, but things don't look particularly good for Coquín;
his last joke, a punning request for clemency, is coldly
brushed aside. "This is no time for laughter," states the
King. "When was it ever?" asks the jester in reply. Left
unanswered, his question poses an allusive challenge to the
repressive authority structuring the Spanish comedia.
The comedia, a tragicomic form of theater usually
performed in conjunction with music, dance and farcical
interludes, enjoyed an immense popularity in the early
decades of the seventeenth century. Its success was due, in
part, to an emphasis on national themes: tapping Spain's
rich ballad tradition, the comedia transformed the country's
legendary past into a widely appealing dramatic present...
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Quiet
Ann Smock
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This is a reading of Bartleby, Herman Melville's
novella, to which Blanchot sometimes refers. Bartleby is a
biography, the biography of a law-copyist, or scrivener. At
least, so the narrator, a lawyer and Bartleby's one-time
employer, says: not a complete biography––in Bartleby's
case "nothing of the sort is possible"––but just "a few
passages," he says, "from the life of Bartleby, who was a
scrivener, the strangest I ever saw, or heard of."
Whatever happened to make him so strange?
Whatever caused him to be so inexplicable? There really
must be some explanation. Let us begin thus, interrupting
perhaps a little rudely––manifesting some anxious
impatience and sounding, perhaps, a bit like Nippers (one of
Bartleby's fellow copyists) in the mornings, before dinner
time, when the irritability which regrettably characterizes him
tends to flare up...
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Le Pain de Ponge: Mangé enfin! Dans l’abîme.
Elizabeth Bloomfield
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Le Pain de Ponge appartient au recueil Le Parti-Pris
des choses. Ce recueil, publié en 1942, au début de la
carrière de Ponge, installe fermement et définitivement la
voix de son auteur dans les marges d'une certaine poésie
traditionnelle, une certaine "poésie poétique". Choisir
comme objet d'écriture les choses ordinaires et nues, les
choses dans leur neutralité prépoétique et prédiscursive, c'est
déjà en soi un geste de rebellion à l'égard d'une tradition qui
a tendance à assimiler non seulement poésie et subjectivité,
mais aussi à transformer le réel en réel poétique voire en
surréel ou en "présence."
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A Number of Yes
Jacques Derrida
with Avital Ronell and Brian Holmes
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Yes, in a foreign land. We must have come across
each other most often in a foreign land. These encounters
retain an emblematic value for me. Perhaps because they
took place elsewhere, far away, but more surely because we
never separated without a promise; I have not forgotten.
Nor have I forgotten what Michel de Certeau writes of
writing in the mystical text: through and through, it is also a
promise.
To me, it is as if these encounters in the other's
country (by which I also mean the interruption immediately
marking them, the separation which tears apart their very
event) described in their own way the paths taken by thought
as it intermingles with the word given in writing: at the heart
of the same time, of a single time, the opening and the cut...
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Volume 2.2 is available at JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.