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The Staircase Wit:or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller’s Prose
Get PDF‘The Staircase Wit; or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller’s Prose’ explores idioms and Sprachbilder as poetic views of the mother tongue. This exploration involves a special focus on Müller’s Nobel lecture, considered as both a compendium and an enactment of her meditations on language, on the nature of writing, and on the creative process. While Müller frequently employs idioms in her articles, lectures, and novel titles, she never uses them in a superficial way or as a mere reproduction of common or daily speech. Rather, as this essay argues, idioms in Müller’s prose are indicative of her attitude toward language and toward the mother tongue in general. In the Nobel lecture as well as elsewhere, idioms serve a dual, occasionally conflicting purpose, combining the need for the ‘singularity’ of aesthetic experience with the search for a new kind of ‘conventionality’
Self Study
Get PDFDavid Kishik’s Self Study (ICI Berlin Press, 2023) is a genre-bending work of autophilosophy. It opens a rare, rear window into the schizoid position of self-sufficient withdrawal and impassive indifference. This inability to be enriched by outer experiences feeds the relentless suspicion that hell is other people. Laying bare his life and work, Kishik engages with psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cultural inquiry to trace loneliness across the history of thought, leading to today’s shut-in society and the autonomous subject of liberal capitalism. David Kishik will read from his book, followed by a conversation with Maggie Nelson and a Q&A with the audience. David Kishik lives in New York and teaches at Emerson College. Self Study is the fifth and final volume in his series of books, To Imagine a Form of Life. Previous titles include The Book of Shem and The Manhattan Project, both published by Stanford University Press. Some shorter texts appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Maggie Nelson is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming collection Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (2007), Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007), and Jane: A Murder (2005). In 2016 she received a MacArthur ‘genius’ Fellowship. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023) Paperback | 12 EUR | v, 174 pp. | 17.8 cm x 12.7 cm | ISBN 978-3-96558-045-
Anti-eugenics after the Genome
Get PDFSince the 1990s, genomics has promised cures for major challenges to human survival, among them disease, food shortages, fertility problems, and climate change. It has offered a vision of a better world by sequencing and modifying the building blocks of life. This promise of a better world echoes the statistical utopianism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the measurement of norms and averages to cure social problems. At least one legacy of this thinking in the current techno-sphere is the idea that good and bad health can be assessed through biometric calculation. What has changed are the tools for measuring these values. Human traits disappear into caches of genetic information, estimated and compared in segments, at a distance from the medical descriptions, social values, historical systems, ecological milieux, and literary conventions that have supplied these traits with meaning. This surplus of information needs new narratives to justify the cost of intervening in life at molecular scales. Drawing out the surprising proximity between narratives and technologies of genomic sequencing, this talk looks back to the concerns of the statistical utopians, and forward to the forms that anti-eugenics might take after the genome. Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures in the Department of English at University College London, where she is also Associate Faculty in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. She researches the interplay of science and technology, critical race and postcolonial studies, and sociological realism in modern and contemporary literature. She has published articles and chapters in The Sociological Review, Journal of Literature and Science, Medical Humanities, Journal of Historical Geography, and in The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Her book, Narrative in the Age of the Genome (2021), considers measures of the human in genomic narratives
From Solar Futures to Future Solidarity
Get PDFThe sun has been a continuous element of utopian imagination — as a cultural form, an ideological power, and a spiritual force. The energy of the sun keeps the planet functional, regulates the metabolic rhythms of plants and animals, and is part of a contemporary global capital of technological and economic power. Some theories assert that solar emissions also have a biopolitical impact on human sociology, psychology, and historical events; they present a close correlation between the periods of highest solar activity and certain revolutionary or progressive movements. In this sense, Michel Serres (1980) once defined the sun as our energetic horizon and the ‘ultimate capital’ in the history of modern religion, culture, ecology, and economy. Georges Bataille (1931) also discussed the sun as a constructive and destructive force shifting between order and disorder. One of the foundations of solar politics is its relationship to energy, which in the last centuries has shaped some ideologies related to work, capitalism, progress, imperialism, and productivism; and energy was also the founding basis for certain ethical and epistemological concepts in ecology (Simon-Stickley, 2021). Solar energy constitutes one of the most important subjects in the current context of international politics: the circulation of power between those who control energy production and those who depend on it. Given this context, it’s crucial to transform solar energy into a possible mechanism of contestation against forms of authoritarianism, neoliberalism, autocratic systems, and climate crisis. Can this critical context be reassessed through concepts such as the ecosocialism of David Schwartzman (1996) or the solar communism of Michael Löwy (2011), which have their origins in the ecological movement as well as in the Marxist critique of political economy? These concepts, which are based in non-monetary and extra-economic criteria, take into account the preservation of ecological balance by opposing it to capitalist production systems. This might imply rescuing the Marxist idea of social justice and articulating it in a new relationship with nature. Condemning forms of heliocentrism that develop procedures of marginality, appropriation, and energetic imperialism, this symposium will reflect on the complexities of solar energy. It encourages the idea that it is essential to seek solar futures and future solidarity outside of such procedures and to look for responses that promote a sustainable and equitable future in regard to the production of energy
