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“We are sitting on a time bomb”: a multiperspectival approach to inter-national development at an east African border
Full text linkRecent discussion in critical border studies has reaffirmed the validity and necessity of multiperspectival approaches which move beyond state-centric outlooks to include diverse viewpoints of people at or on borders. One understudied aspect of everyday border life involves how international development organisations fit within wider dynamics of cross-border activities. Drawing upon experiences of development projects at a key border crossing between Kenya and Uganda, I explore (1) how perceptions of risk and danger contribute to constructions of the border towns as places in need of development interventions, and (2) how this border also adds to practical and logistical concerns already held by development organisations as they deliver these interventions. I argue that the place-based mix of location, material forms, and perceptions or practices impacts how ‘inter-national development’ is rationalised in border regions
A semblance of life:: Raymond Roussel’s speculative prose
No full textRaymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique first appeared in 1909, but as a major work of the modernist tradition it is hardly known and even less well understood in the Anglophone world. I will introduce the text here and explicate its theoretical implications, for in its procedural approach to fiction it operates on a level of formalism that, along with the flatness of Roussel’s prose and the bizarre adventures he describes, has contributed to the lack of interest shown by English readers. But this lack of interest overlooks the nature of the experimentation in Roussel’s work and the consequences this unveils, as it leads to a narrative that conveys a powerful sense of autonomy, a text that appears to bear a life of its own with the concomitant implications this has for the materiality of its language, a textual approach perhaps unfamiliar to English readers but no less significant as a critical form of modernist thinking and writing. After having examined Roussel’s work in depth I will then take up the central part of his writing procedure, the transformation of sentences, and show how this creates a surprising analogue to the notion of the speculative sentence that Hegel developed in his Phenomenology. But the significance of this association lies in the fact that the formal experiments of Roussel’s writings deliver a way of thinking about the relation of language and materiality that does not rationalize it into a system of thought. Instead, the syntactical relations of Roussel’s writings bear mimetic relations to the world of things, in a manner akin to the language-like quality of the artwork discussed by Theodor W. Adorno but that is here transferred into language, which enables them to articulate the prosaic forms of the world as a mode of speculative material knowledge
The absolute milieu:: Blanchot’s aesthetics of melancholy
No full textUnlike his other fictional works Blanchot’s 1953 narrative Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas has received comparatively little attention. The reasons for this would seem to lie in the intense abstraction of his writing in this work, which is forbidding even by his own standards, but as I will show, this intensity can be understood as comprising a singular topography of the experience of writing. Blanchot’s narrative thereby becomes a very precise and concrete form of aesthetics, which can be usefully compared to the understandings of melancholy developed by Benjamin and Adorno, but transposed into a more stringent modernist contex
Aesthetics of negativity:: Blanchot, Adorno, and autonomy
No full text Maurice Blanchot and Theodor W. Adorno are among the most difficult but also the most profound thinkers in twentieth-century aesthetics. While their methods and perspectives differ widely, they share a concern with the negativity of the artwork conceived in terms of either its experience and possibility or its critical expression. Such negativity is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic but concerns the status of the artwork and its autonomy in relation to its context or its experience. For both Blanchot and Adorno negativity is the key to understanding the status of the artwork in post-Kantian aesthetics and, although it indicates how art expresses critical possibilities, albeit negatively, it also shows that art bears an irreducible ambiguity such that its meaning can always negate itself. This ambiguity takes on an added material significance when considered in relation to language as the negativity of the work becomes aesthetic in the further sense of being both sensible and experimental, and in doing so the language of the literary work becomes a form of thinking that enables materiality to be thought in its ambiguity.In a series of rich and compelling readings, William S. Allen shows how an original and rigorous mode of thinking arises within Blanchot’s early writings and how Adorno’s aesthetics depends on a relation between language and materiality that has been widely overlooked. Furthermore, by reconsidering the problem of the autonomous work of art in terms of literature, a central issue in modernist aesthetics is given a greater critical and material relevance as a mode of thinking that is abstract and concrete, rigorous and ambiguous. While examples of this kind of writing can be found in the works of Blanchot and Beckett, the demands that such texts place on readers only confirm the challenges and the possibilities that literary autonomy poses to thought.<br/
Dead transcendence: Blanchot, Heidegger, and the reverse of language
No full textIn this essay I will examine the development of the notion of transcendence in Blanchot's early critical writings. Doing so indicates the radical way that Blanchot reconfigures this central ontological and theological term by way of his readings of the literary use of language. In turn this exposes the essential relation between finitude and literature, something which the second part of the essay will examine by way of Heidegger's study of the myth of Er
To articulate the void by a void: aporetic writing and thinking in L'Attente l'oubli.
No full textThis essay will discuss Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli by examining the relation between the space of its sentences and that of the room they describe. This relation arises as a new understanding of literary space that indicates how far he has moved from his earlier thought of the récit as a search for an imaginary centre. For in this approach Blanchot has found a thought of space that is eccentric and aporetic, which reveals the nature and possibility of relation as an exposure to the outside.
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