Posing a powerful challenge to dominant trends in cultural analysis, this book covers the whole history of the concept of culture, providing the broadest study of this notion to date. Johnson and Michaelsen examine the principal methodological strategies or metaphors of anthropology in the past two decades (embodied in works by Edward Said, James Clifford, George Marcus, V. Y. Mudimbe, and others) and argues that they do not manage to escape anthropology’s grounding in representational practices. To the extent that it remains a practice of representation, anthropology, however complex, critical, or self-reflexive, cannot avoid objectifying its others. Extending beyond a critique of anthropology, the book reads the twinned notions of the human and culture across the long history of the human sciences broadly conceived, including anthropology, cultural studies, history, literature, and philosophy. Although there is no chance, they argue, for a “new” anthropology that would not repeat the old anthropology’s problem of disciplining the other, they also recognize that there may be no way out of anthropology. We are always writing, thinking, and living in anthropology’s wake, within its specific compass or horizon. Moreover, they demonstrate, we have been doing so for a very long time, since at least the beginning of the institution of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle.
El artículo muestra la relación estructural entre el testimonio y el juicio estético, y cómo la mentira estructural se implica irreductiblemente como la posibilidad de la verdad. Se explica la necesaria imposibilidad del testimonio como condición de su posibilidad, argumento anticipado por J. L. Borges: “No hay una sola hermosa palabra, con la excepción dudosa de testigo, que no sea una abstracción”. La argumentación se apoya en la teoría husserliana del syncategorema (palabras incompletas cuyo sen- tido depende del contexto) y en los deícticos (palabras esencialmente ocasionales); asimismo, se toma de I. Kant el papel de la imaginación y los efectos del “como si”.
"As If, As Such" reads Derrida's understanding of the institution of literature as both the most interesting thing in the world and "perhaps" more interesting than the world in relation to his remark that the noema remains one of the most difficult and problematic concepts in Husserl's phenomenological toolbox. By focusing on the noema as the objective side of consciousness and thus as what does not properly belong to consciousness, hence as the site of the tension between form and matter, the following essay also explains why Derrida claimed that the "as" was always the target of deconstruction. Ultimately, "As If, As Such" seeks to elaborate what Derrida called the "power of literature" as that which is at work in the possibility of life.
Este ensayo interpreta la idea hobbesiana del tiempo y de la constitucion del sentido como “sentido decadente” o como imaginacion, para arguir que la guerra —la guerra de todos contra todos— es una condicion universal y existencial de y para la vida. El ensayo investiga la concepcion de Hobbes del lenguaje, del miedo y de la anticipacion para demostrar la incondicionalidad de la guerra y, ademas, argumenta que, en Hobbes, la paz es una modificacion empirica de la guerra, para concluir — contra Foucault— que en Hobbes no hay una distincion entre la guerra y el “estado de guerra”, y que la “guerra” existencial debe entenderse como una forma del “cuidarse de si” hobbesiano, que Foucault mismo dice que es “co-extensivo con la vida”. El ensayo pone en tela de juicio la interpretacion foucaultiana —siguiendo a Seneca y a otros— de que la parresia resulta de la indiferencia o desapego por la vida, esto es, el resultado de vivir la vida como si uno ya estuviese muerto
Research Article| July 01 2012 The Hunger for a Life without Différance: On Juan Manuel Garrido David E. Johnson David E. Johnson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2012) 12 (2): 271–282. https://doi.org/10.2307/41949792 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David E. Johnson; The Hunger for a Life without Différance: On Juan Manuel Garrido. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 July 2012; 12 (2): 271–282. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41949792 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
Talking to Ourselves, Over Her (Dead) Body:On Heidegger, Borges, and Seeing the Other David E. Johnson (bio) In a text that stages a conversation or "dialogue" between himself (the "Inquirer") and Tezuka Tomio (the "Japanese"), Martin Heidegger remembers the visits of another Japanese who had come to Germany to study with Husserl, the Count Shuzo Kuki, who occasionally came to Heidegger's house to talk with him outside of the academic context. Heidegger recalls: "Our dialogues were not formal, scholarly discussions. . . . The dialogues of which I am thinking came about at my house, like a spontaneous game" (1971, 4). On such occasions Count Kuki came with his wife, who, Heidegger says, "wore festive Japanese garments" (4). He comments that "They made the Eastasian world more luminously present, and the danger of our dialogues became more clearly visible" (4). The dialogue between the Inquisitor and the Japanese, hence an intercultural dialogue, what Heidegger called "a dialogue from house to house" and that according to him "remains nearly impossible," nevertheless became possible in the presence of one who never spoke and to whom no one addressed himself, in the presence of the Asian woman [End Page 143] (5). With his comment about the near impossibility of dialogue, Heidegger recognizes that the risk or danger of distortion is the condition of possibility of dialogue, that is, that dialogue will be distorted. In the necessary translation between the two houses constitutive of dialogue, the possibility itself of dialogue—that it be the effect of translation—threatens to ruin the dialogue. Heidegger underlines that the fact that the dialogue was sustained in German meant, according to the Japanese, that the properly Japanese, the essence of Japanese culture, was translated to a conceptual system foreign to Japanese, a conceptual system within which inevitably it proved impossible to say precisely the essence of Japanese. Heidegger admits, "The danger of our dialogues was hidden in language itself, not in what we discussed, nor in the way in which we tried to do so" (4). The Japanese interlocutor adds that the danger of dialogue lies in the fact that "[t]he language of the dialogue constantly destroyed the possibility of saying what the dialogue was about" (5). Although Heidegger presents the difficulty or the danger of dialogue as a problem proper to translation—the effort "to say the essential nature of Eastasian art and poetry" in a European language—the constant destruction of the possibility of saying that which dialogue wants to say is even more general (4). It is a problem inherent to language itself. This means that translation—or the problem that translation proposes to dialogue—is consubstantial to language. The possibility, the chance, of a dialogue without translation does not exist; therefore, there does not exist the possibility of a dialogue in a single language that avoids the problem of translation and, thus, that eludes the danger of dialogue. In this context it is worthwhile to recall the first sentence of Jorge Luis Borges's "Las Versiones Homéricas" (The Homeric Versions): "There is no problem as consubstantial with letters and their modest mystery as that which a translation proposes" (Ningún problema tan consustancial con las letras y con su modesto misterio como el que propone una traducción) (1996, 1:239, translation mine). As consubstantial with letters (letras), but also literature (letras), translation does not necessarily imply transit between two languages: that is to say, the effect of translation is legible even within a single language. Nor is this an exclusively Borgesian—hence fantastical, fictional—position. Rather, Heidegger also shared this position. In the 1942 [End Page 144] lecture course devoted to Hölderlin's hymn, "Der Ister," Heidegger notes, "translating does not only move between two different languages, but there is a translating within one and the same language" (1996b, 62). But if language is understood as necessary translation—that is, if it is the case that there is no single language that is not marked, within itself, by the movement of translation—then it is also the case that language, qua translation, constantly destroys the possibility of saying what the dialogue wants to say even as language makes dialogue possible. There...
You can refute Hawks in name of Ray (or vice versa), or admit them both, but to anyone who would reject them both I make so bold as to say this: Stop going to cinema, don't watch any more films, for you will never know meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, of poetic intuition, a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, cinema. An insufferable pretension? No: a wonderful certainty . . . - Truffeut, Wonderful Certainty (108) This statement by a Truffaut has always been among my favorite passages from his early criticism. Its stridency can seem puzzling-or even quaint-to a contemporary student of film studies. Is Truffaut, after all, really telling his own reader to give up on cinema if he or she finds nothing of worth in these directors? The short answer is, yes, as anyone who has read Truffaut's other writings will attest. And yet, even if one feels that such arguments do not always make a logical sense, they usually compel reader to an evaluative judgment (if only to crystallize said reader's opinions against Truffaut's own). To this day, I have no idea how one might go about refuting Howard Hawks in name of Nicholas Ray (or vice versa), and although I like both filmmakers, I cannot imagine its being incumbent on anyone to give up on cinema should that person not connect with, for example, Only Angels Have Wings or In a Lonely Place. Nor am I entirely convinced that same person would, by extension, not be able to articulate a basic understanding of inspiration or, for that matter, a view finder. But Truffaut's raw, energetic, often maddening critical engagement with cinema nonetheless provides both historical context for emergence of auteurism (and, one could argue, film studies itself) as well as some of most rapturous-and, at risk of being repetitive, maddening-prose written on medium. Of course, any interest in Truffaut's writings is always supplemented by knowledge that he would become a filmmaker. I have no doubt my own investment in passage is augmented by that history; novelist Michael Chabon eloquently observes this effect in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, when he points out the only true portents: those that reveal [. . .] themselves, and impossible to ignore, in retrospect (265). The writings now seem to serve as unmistakable training ground of a future director, whereas at time they were simply fiery provocations of a young turk. And yet, regardless of how one views writings against films (or vice versa), it's clear that Truffaut was always heavily invested in adaptation. His most famous piece of prose, Certain Tendency of French Cinema, was, after all, an indictment of adaptations of two of France's leading screenwriters, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. And so many of his films were themselves adaptations. Robert Stam, in his recent, absorbing text, Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation, describes Truffaut's adaptation methods in a passage that, in its own way, seems to echo Truffaut himself (here, in reference to Jules and Jim): Rather than 'copy' novel, Truffaut applied a kind of electroshock to it, exploding it into discursive fragments and shards to be reassembled and recontextualized and collaged together with 'alien' materials from other sources (85). We are very pleased to begin this issue with three essays dealing in part or in whole with Truffaut and adaptation. In Francois Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock: A Pygmalion Tragedy, Aner Preminger presents a deliberate (mis)reading of Harold Bloom in order to trace out complex ways that influence of Hitchcock's Vertigo can be felt in two of Truffaut's best known films: Shoot Piano Player and Jules and Jim. In doing so, Preminger also shows how both Hitchcock and Truffaut are themselves deliberately misreading Pygmalion myth. …
