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- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(författare)
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Blanchot’s L’ârret de mort : Allegory and the Trauma of History
- 2016
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Blanchot’s L’ârret de mort (1948) has long been recognised as a seminal modernist text, but after Derrida it has tended to be read for its ‘writerly’ qualities. Perhaps for this reason, while scores of readings have focused on Blanchot’s meditations on questions such as the nature of writing, on the figure of night and language, and on parallels to his monumental ‘La Littérature et le droit à la mort’ (1948), the question of history as it is developed in the récit (the spectre of the Holocaust, ‘nach Auschwitz’) has been discussed (e.g. Hess 1999; Rothberg 2000) but not fully examined, nor have the ways in which L’ârret de mort may be reread after the publication of the semi-autobiographical L’instant de ma mort (1994). This paper will examine Blanchot’s translation of history and trauma in the récit, framed through a theoretical discussion of the nature of allegory as translation. Comparing Benjamin’s influential discussion of allegory in his Trauerspiels (1928) with Blanchot’s discussion of similar themes (somewhat differently) in ‘Le langage de la fiction’ (1949), the idea of allegory as a response to historical trauma will be introduced to challenge the idea that ‘there is simply no place for hermeneutical or rhetorical considerations’ (Shaviro 1990) when reading L’ârret de mort. The text operates as an allegory not simply of traumatic French political history (the Munich Crisis, Operation Paula, and more obliquely, the Holocaust), but of Blanchot’s own traumatic history, his experience of surviving a firing-squad recounted in the later récit. It is precisely insofar as Blanchot’s allegory refuses simplistic metaphrase (for instance, in the ways in which the very precision of the text’s dating is displaced - was 13th October 1938 a Wednesday or Thursday?) that we know it to be allegory as such: it is only thus that we know that what is at stake here is not simply a question of mourning but melancholia, the trauma of history, of a wound (τραύμα) which can never be fully healed.
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| 2. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(författare)
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Myth and Melancholia : Schelling on Aesthetic Autonomy
- 2016
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper will seek to examine Schelling’s philosophy of art, in particular in how it develops between his Naturphilosophie of the System (1800) and his 1840s lectures on positive philosophy. Schelling’s philosophy is widely misunderstood, marginalized in a syntactic footnote of the journey from Kant to Hegel, but his philosophy of art is even less fully comprehended. By showing how Schelling breaks from Kant in the late 1790s and early 1800s, this paper will reposition him at the forefront of the aesthetic debates of the German idealists. Schelling’s theory of art, based upon a cultural and historical reconsideration of the Bewusstlosigkeit prior to the work of art as such, focuses more and more on the complex historical and social relationships between myth, art and society, and in so doing compares with the work of two key later German philosophers of art, Benjamin and Heidegger.
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