Abstract: “Seminar on the Dual Unity and the Phantom” translates into English Nicolas Abraham’s notes from a presentation series delivered at the Societe psychanalytique de Paris in 1974-5. These were collected as a single essay and published in French by his partner Maria Torok following Abraham’s untimely death in 1975. The Seminar introduces the dual unity as a clinical concept to account for patient symptomatology where traumatic structures resist intervention and are seemingly impossible to locate. Abraham describes these pathologies in terms of a phantom; the transmission down generations of gaps and silences in comprehension that disrupt emerging subjectivity at its foundation. Abraham demonstrates through a number of clinical and fictional cases how phantoms are transferred unwittingly into an individual psyche and uses this to pose questions about the boundaries of selfhood that extend beyond his pathological examples. As a broader metapsychological concept, the dual unity explains the mechanisms of self-formation in general terms as the always incomplete separation of an individual from the maternal context. Abraham conceives of selfhood as a symbolic response to and overcoming of the traumas that characterize human existence, which begin with the loss(es) of the mother. He describes the birth of the subject, therefore, as the accession to symbolic life through words split off from the maternal context and used to designate objects in the outside world. The words, however, still retain traces of that first relationship in the connection they draw to the drama of separation and the maternal unconscious that haunts this scission as the protector and a danger to individuation. The duality of the mother-child relationship is transformed through the objective use of words into a relation between the shared meaning of language (understood at the level of ego) and a “whole stratification of maternal imagos” that constitute the individual unconscious and whose traces inhabit those same words. This constant connection to the mother means we are always separate-unseparated beings; dual unities open to the continual threat of haunting.

Abstract: Catherine Malabou’s Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality represents a new contribution to a series of books by critical theorists seeking to assess the relationship between Kant’s thought and contemporary critical thinking. My review proceeds in three steps. First, I contextualize the book by contrasting its approach to that of its antecedents. Second, I reconstruct Malabou’s central argument, according to which Kant’s notion of an “epigenesis of reason,” as presented in the Critique of Pure Reason , can be read as a movement of self-appropriation and self-formation by reason, which becomes evident in the Critique of the Power of Judgment . I focus on how this reading leads to a polemic engagement with Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of Kant, which, according to Malabou, is unable to provide a coherent account of the tension between necessity and contingency in the forms of thought. Third, I develop a critical assessment of both Meillasssoux’s and Malabou’s readings of Kant. By reconstructing Kant’s own reformulations of the distinction between necessity and contingency throughout his theoretical and practical philosophy, I show that both theorists leave aside an essential tenet of his critical enterprise, namely, the detachment of the realm of freedom and action from the realm of cognition. Thus I conclude that, although Malabou is right in that the categories of necessity and contingency are subject to an open-ended transformation in the cognitive realm, the development of these categories in Kant’s work is closely linked to his conception of action, which stems from the gap as well as the interrelation between theoretical and practical reason.

Abstract: If a stone cannot be read, in the conventional sense, what do we see on, or in, or through stones? And what can we do with them? This essay begins in media res , with reading, writing, and things -- specifically stones – and considers them as sites for a new ecology of criticism. It wonders about stones, especially the ones we fancy extravagantly, and proposes these lapidary mirrors as places to reconsider the relationship between word, image, and looking – as provocations, that is, to a new style of reading. To begin, the use of beguiling rocks as objects of consumption, poetic inspiration, and artistic manipulation by Chinese artists and literati is considered through the lens of Roger Caillois’s writings about mimicry, particularly as applied to a Lacanian vision of human subjectivity as the play of picture and screen. Considered along with its etymological cousins “stun” and “stain” in the penumbra of Lacan’s reflections, this analysis proposes fetishized stones as a literalization of the screen’s petrifying function, the behind of the looking glass which renders everything in sight an impossible imago, a storied surface, a reified other. Where such speculation reveals stone as a grave site for critically sore eyes, this essay turns to the very different possibilities of stone-human interaction traced in the touching and disarming poetics of Ouyang Xiu’s “The Stone of Ling Stream.” In this case a stone morphs from object of desire into tactile companion as its human subject reshapes his connoisseur’s drive to know and own into a haptic meditation beside the stone. The essay argues that with this gesture Ouyang Xiu not only embraces a Chinese Buddhist aesthetic and spiritual tradition --contemplation of the void or lack -- but also gropes toward a fruitful ethics of “stone blindness” as a mode of understanding. By surrendering a visual drive that extends its instrumental aggression to every animal, plant and stone in sight, the poet writes himself out of the surveillance of the world-as-text. Instead, assuming a posture of quiet attention and openness, he re-approaches being obliquely and gently from another direction. In so doing he practices an art and poetics of “being with” that not only feels for the ends of critical vision, but also invites us to drop our gazes and egos alike to listen to Heidegger’s “call of the world.”

Abstract: This article revisits the textual and political encounter between two of the most important figures of twentieth-century French letters – Jacques Derrida and Jean Genet, focusing on Glas , the former’s 1974 monumental book partially dedicated to the latter. Instead of turning to Derrida's detailed reading of Genet's earlier works, however, I ollow the traces, contained within Glas , of Genet's radical political engagements of the real time of the book’s writing, and specifically his alliance with the Palestinian armed forces in Jordan and Lebanon. Reading these traces together with the material directly facing them in this double-column book – a discussion of the family in Hegel – I follow Derrida on his journey following the “remains” of dialectical motion and their political signification – the Jew in Hegel's Christian-philosophical work and the Palestinian struggle with “Europe” itself – showing how Derrida is already addressing here some of his “later” concerns: the politics of deconstruction, the Jew as “cut,” and the theological underpinning of philosophy. But I argue that these anti-dialectical “remains” in Glas feature not only on the level of the signified but also – and perhaps most significantly – on the level of writing’s form itself. I uncover the genealogy of Glas' s unique structure – from Derrida and Genet's earlier texts to a book-project Genet was immersed in during the years of Glas ’s writing and finally to the influences of non-Christian writing traditions (the Jewish Talmud, but also the Muslim Tafsir ). In so doing, I consider the ways Derrida and Genet both create a decolonial form of writing for anti-colonial struggles – as a critique of European absolute knowledge manifest on the level of textuality itself.

Abstract: The essay reads Edgar Rice Burroughs’s pulp novel Tarzan of the Apes (1912) in the context of the tendency in Western thought to understand anthropogenesis as a process of going-astray or, to use a term that gets its contemporary connotation of sexual errancy around the time of Tarzan’s publication, of queering. The essay makes its argument by providing two interrelated discursive contexts for the novel. First, it explores Burroughs’s novel as an early twentieth-century text that illustrates the vocative ethics of Western thought. This tradition finds its most authoritative articulation in the concept of “calling” (Berufung) in Martin Luther’s theology; its twentieth-century elaborators include Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jean Laplanche. To situate Tarzan of the Apes in this history, the essay analyzes a series of scenes where the novel’s protagonists are variously solicited in the process of their development. The most important of such scenes is Tarzan’s discovery of his “fascinating avocation” as he begins to read the books that, unbeknownst to him, have been left behind by his dead human parents. The essay takes the two terms—“fascination” and “avocation”—as keywords not only in Burroughs’s novel but also in the longer genealogy of thought that the text develops.Second, the essay takes its cues from Burroughs’s previous readers, most notably Gail Bederman, who have argued that the novel evinces turn-of-the-century anxieties about the viability of Western civilization in the face of neurasthenic and other degenerative tendencies. The essay expands this argument in mapping this moment to a larger, and more transnational, context that stretches from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s eighteenth-century philosophy to nineteenth-century racial sciences and the subsequent emergence of sexology. It is in psychoanalytic thought, and particularly Laplanche’s work, that we find a late twentieth-century example of the thought of “queer hominization” as the human “calling” or “(a)vocation.” According to Laplanche, “enigmatic signifiers” “call” or “fascinate” the infant to an errant mode of becoming, one whose perversity includes the inhuman potential of the “grotesque.” After “fascination” and “avocation,” the “grotesque” is identified as the third keyword in Tarzan of the Apes, as well as the larger philosophical tradition in which the novel belong.

Abstract: There is no shortage of 19th, 20th and 21st century literature condemning the generic, the formulaic, and the banal as not simply bad writing, but as a broader symptom of cultural stagnation; a topic which has recently re-ignited in debates over ‘anti-critique’ or ‘post-criticism’. But is it possible to write a history of the cliche, which the cliche itself is not automatically excluded from? Is it possible to critically think through that which expresses the absence of critical thought? This paper pursues this question by exploring what is meant by the ‘time’ of cliches. It builds on Boris Groys’ concept of ‘anti-philosophy’ to suggest that a straightforward ‘history’ risks privileging a particular critical viewpoint that mistakenly insists on the cliche as a mark of difference, rather than a peculiar and perturbing sameness which is both superfluous and tyrannical in equal measure. Instead, the paper suggests that, the time of cliches should be viewed through particular sites where the boundaries between philosophical meaning and non-meaning – and, in turn, technological and human, archival and visible, intellectual and everyday – are contested and underdetermined. The paper explores the concept of the rhetorical ‘commonplace’ as one such site where the marking of cliche exposes a range of specific material and contextual configurations that shape the conditions for the suspicion of cliche as tyrannical, stupid or stagnant.