journal article
LitStream Collection
Home
2008 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2008-001
This guest column suggests that we should follow Hannah Arendt in resisting the urge to expound doctrines or systems and, instead, should disclose the processes of our thought as they are “in motion.” While we should not hesitate to express judgments, our aim in intellectual work should be to occasion (and experience) surprise. Like Arendt, we should candidly express “the bliss of thought” as we think and write. On this basis, the political arena can become “a space for self-analysis and (by analogy with psychoanalysis) continuous rebirth.” And it is only on this basis, Kristeva argues, that reconstruction, after a century of unprecedented destruction, be accomplished without our succumbing to nostalgia. Efforts at reconstruction must be undertaken, as Arendt undertook them, “in light of the history of nihilism” and “in the name of sheer survival.” Kristeva joins Arendt in advising against a return to foundationalism while at the same time urging the development of a kind of “re-foundationalism.” Kristeva concludes by showing how, in these attitudes, Arendt's thinking was—despite her notorious dismissal of psychoanalysis—in tune with those of Freud.
2008 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2008-002
No other natural kind receives as much abuse in the Aristotelian corpus as the octopus, and an instructive itinerary through that corpus can be constructed by following the manifestations of such abuse. Specifically, the octopus is judged “stupid” and endowed with poor, rudimentary structure; together with fellow cephalopoda and mollusks, it is even regarded as behaving “contrary to nature.” The moral that emerges from following this path is that Aristotle may be expressing here a deep conflict between two different models equally present in his work, though they are assigned very different emphasis. Also, importantly, mollusks are said to be “mutilated,” which aligns the treatment they receive with the one Aristotle famously reserves for women.
2008 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2008-003
“The Case of `The Yellow Notebook'” contains reminiscences of Wittgenstein's conversations with the philosopher Tatiana Gornshteyn (1904-80) on his visit to Leningrad in 1935. The reminiscences are contained in a document written by her daughter Ludmila. It records a story about a “Yellow Notebook” of his work (in the genre of his so-called Blue and Brown Books)—a notebook that, it is claimed, Wittgenstein gave to Tatiana and was subsequently lost. Attempts have been made to find it in Russia and all have failed. Biographical and historical context is provided in an introductory essay by the translator.
Tamen, Miguel; Andersen, Wayne; Rao, Velcheru Narayana; Subrahmanyam, Sanjay; Rowland, Ingrid D.; Hunter, J. Paul; Wong, Yoke-Sum
2008 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2008-004
The essay discusses the presumption of one's singularity, the uniqueness of one's time, the picturesqueness of one actions, and the capacity of human beings, whether corporately or individually, to begin everything or indeed anything again from scratch. Such presumptions are indeed present in some varieties of contemporary fanaticism, but, more to the point, it is suggested that the feeling of doing something for the first time is the oldest feeling in the world.
2008 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2008-005
This essay forms part of an “elegiac symposium” on “what gets lost during paradigm shifts,” and it replies to an earlier contribution to that symposium, “Regarding Change at Ise-Jingu” by Jeffrey M. Perl (14, no. 2 (2008): 208-20; DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2007-069)) . Andersen argues against or supplements Perl's contention that Japanese attitudes toward change differ radically from those that are standard in the West. Andersen expands on arguments made by Roland Barthes—an explicator and partisan of Japanese thought—to show that at least one Greek myth (that of the unchanging ship Argo) deals with change, originality, updating, fakes, and replication in a way similar to those standard in Japanese culture. Andersen then pursues his argument, as well, with respect to works by Rodin, Sade, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Rao, Velcheru Narayana; Subrahmanyam, Sanjay
2008 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2008-006
The essay reflects in an elegiac mode on a now largely forgotten (or effaced) body of literature from precolonial India regarding the art and business of politics. This body, known as nti, has classical roots in Sanskrit but came in particular to be popular in peninsular India between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries in vernacular languages such as Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi. Secular and this-worldly in orientation, it can be broadly contrasted to the far better known body of texts on dharma, which are concerned to preserve a normative, ritually and religiously sanctioned, order based on strict adherence to caste and gender roles. We first trace the classical roots of the tension between dharma and nti and then set out how these two bodies of texts came to play distinct and evolving roles in medieval and early modern south India. We argue further that under the early phase of colonial rule, East India Company officials misunderstood the nature of nti texts and that this has led to a persistently erroneous view of their role and content. We conclude by noting, however, that some astute modern observers of and participants in Indian politics, such as B. R. Ambedkar, have understood the part that nti might play for the development of a secular language of politics in modern India.
2008 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2008-007
Burned at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1600, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was the first modern thinker to propose that the universe contained an infinite number of planetary systems revolving around individual stars. He announced his startling propositions at the moment when European explorers were beginning to reveal the real size and complexity of earth itself (indeed, Bruno also spoke forcefully against the violence and profiteering of Spanish colonial efforts) and when natural philosophers had begun to dispute about the very structure of the universe. It may not be a coincidence that the religious troubles of sixteenth-century Europe arose at a time when humanity's very place in the world and the cosmos no longer seemed certain. In Bruno's case, pursuit of his ideas compelled him to leave behind not only the security of his Dominican convent in Naples, but also, and more radically, the security of a traditional sense of who and where he was. His infinite universe terrified a thinker as unconventional as Johannes Kepler, and still more it terrified the Inquisition. For Bruno himself, the excitement of this infinitely expanded vision of the cosmos was usually enough to overrule any doubt, but when Kepler compared living in Bruno's universe to permanent exile, he captured an essential quality of the Italian philosopher: an intense solitude, a solitude for which his philosophy was only ever a partial cure.
2008 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2008-008
The third of a century between the late 1680s and the early 1720s—a time when a vast number of prolific poets flourished—is almost completely overlooked in literary history, perhaps because there was no single poetic leader and no dominant direction in the poetry. But it was a very fertile period in poetry, with many talented poets and many potential directions that did not develop into dominant trends. Because literary history almost inevitably looks at dominant directions, it tends to pass over not only individual poets who don't quite fit, but also poetic kinds and directions that don't turn out to be the winning ones. One valuable poetic mode in this period is what we might call the fallen, or disappointed, or misdirected lyric—exemplified most notably by Matthew Prior but also created by a host of other poets (Egerton, Chudleigh, Dixon, Hill, and Swift, for example). “Lost” years between distinct eras or directions also raise larger questions about the premises and practices of literary history itself.
2008 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2008-009
According to Thomas Kuhn, the entrenchment of a paradigm, especially in the critical stages when facing anomalies, requires the further suppression of competing ideas. This essay addresses the unconscious entrenchment of European modernist aesthetics in the everyday, especially in the American suburbs of the 1950s, and its popular and cultural manifestations. Taking Levittown as a starting point, modernist architectural principles have since its construction radiated into the mass-housing market and materialized in housing development projects that have led to the rise of suburbia and, more recently, the New Urbanism. Despite the conventional separations of modernism from the more criticized mass-housing development, the same principles of security, shelter, community, and utopia are present in each. Presented by some architects as a postmodernist aesthetic, the central tenets of modernism are still pursued and reimagined as timeless principles in the building of new housing communities, recycled and reconstituted to meet the dreams and desires of the public—a utopia that is both avant-garde and kitsch.