Konturen: Vol 8 (2015)

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/24406

What is a Thing

This issue is co-edited by Nicholas Reynolds and Jeffrey S. Librett.

As the modern world has seemed an increasingly material one, and so increasingly thingly, the very reality of things has often--and from many different perspectives--seemed to elude us. Questions about what things are, and how they mean, questions about how things are to be circumscribed (for example) in epistemological, ethical, aesthetic and political terms, have arguably become--across the course of modernity (and beyond)--both increasingly pressing and increasingly vexed. -- In this extremely broad context, the contributions to the current Special Issue examine specific approaches to things from the later nineteenth century to today within the literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic discourses. The foci range from the descriptive representationalism of nineteenth century German Dinggedicht in Rilkean modernism to the Anglo-American imagist doctrine of "no ideas but in things" and the disruptions of this doctrine in contemporary German and American poetry; from Husserl's call "to the things themselves" to the Derridian displacements of Heideggerian "thing" and on to the most recent developments in "object-oriented metaphysics"; from the Freudian notion of the unconscious as comprising "representations-of-things" to the Lacanian rereading of the lost object as das Ding.

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

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Introduction: What is a Thing
(University of Oregon, 2015) Reynolds, Nicholas; Librett, Jeffrey S.
Open Access
Urgent Matter
(University of Oregon, 2015) Moore, Jonathan
Opening questions about "things" onto the bureaucratically-maintained, compartmentalized discursive, disciplinary claims of "philosophy," "theory," and "poetry," "Urgent Matter" explores these three terms in relation to one another through attention to recent work by Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, the German-American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, and the German poet Ulf Stolterfoht, whose fachsprachen. Gedichte. I-IX (Lingos I-IX. Poems) Waldrop rendered into English in an award-winning translation. The difference between the "things" called "poetry" and "philosophy," as now institutionalized within the academy, is not epistemological, ontological, ahistorical, but a matter of linguistic domains, of so-called concrete "images" as the policed domain of the former and of "abstraction" as the policed domain of the latter. Challenging the binary logics that dominate language use in diverse discursive/disciplinary cultures, Waldrop’s linguistically self-referential, appositional procedures develop ways to use language that are neither linear, nor so much without direction, as multi-directional, offering complexes of adjacency, of asides, of digression, of errancy, of being “alongside,” in lieu of being “opposed to,” that constitute at once a poetics, an aesthetics, an ethics, and a politics. Elaborating a complementary understanding of poetry as “the most philosophic of all writing,” a medium of being “contemporary,” Waldrop and Stolterfoht question poetry’s purposes as one kind of language apparatus among others in the general economy. Whatever poetry might be, it aspires to be in their hands not a thing in itself but a form of self-questioning, of all discourses, all disciplines, that “thing” that binds “poetry” and “philosophy” together, as urgent matter, in continuing.
Open Access
The Freudian Thing and the Ethics of Speech
(University of Oregon, 2015) Wilson, Daniel
In his 1891 On Aphasia Freud defines the “thing” in the terms of J.S. Mill’s empiricist phenomenology as a set of sensory impressions that is linked both to language and to immediate sensory experience. These distinctions structure the Project for a Scientific Psychology and reappear in “The Unconscious,” where Freud writes that the unconscious is a scene of experience that is linked to, but continues to insist in excess of, language. While Lacan opposes das Ding to Freud’s definition, in “The Unconscious,” of the “unconscious Vorstellungen” as “the presentation of the thing alone,” this essay argues that Freud’s definition of the unconscious points to a scene of experience disorganized by language, that is censored by the passage through the mirror stage, and about which the Other knows nothing. The essay ends by looking at several texts by Tito Mukhopadhyay, who is autistic. Mukhopadhyay describes his autism in terms of a decision to not pass through the mirror stage, which left him exposed to a scene of experience disorganized by the desire carried on the Other’s voice. In his eventual decision to enter into language and write of his experience, Mukhopadhyay’s writings locate an ethics of speech that, rather than censor the unconscious presentation of the thing by linking it to a prohibited Oedipal object, makes a space within the discourse of the Other for a universal dimension of human experience.
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Rilke, Phenomenology, and the Sensuality of Thought
(University of Oregon, 2015) Tobias, Rochelle
This paper takes as its point of departure Husserl’s claim that the only world we can speak of is the one given in consciousness or that presents itself to intuition. Husserl’s insistence on the world’s status as a phenomenon whose being can never be verified, as such a verification would require an act of mind, has led to the accusation that phenomenology is nothing but a form of idealism that discounts the validity of everything apart from consciousness. This paper turns this accusation on its head. To the extent that phenomenology addresses the role that consciousness plays in constituting the world, it draws attention to consciousness’ worldly aspects as not only the ground for all intuition but intuition itself in its sensuality. Consciousness is identical with what it observes, be it a bird in flight, the unfolding petals of a rose bud, or a discarded doll gathering dust in an attic. Rilke’s poetry more than any other exposes the sensuality of thought by exploring the inner contours of feeling or what he calls elsewhere the Weltinnenraum. This paper shows the intersection of poetry and phenomenology through a close reading of “Die Rosenschale,” which forms the conclusion of the first volume of the collection Neue Gedichte.
Open Access
At the discretion of the (a-) thing: Derrida and German thought
(University of Oregon, 2015) Appelbaum, David
In this presentation, I examine the doubleness of the thing that is usually masked by the appropriative tendencies of life. Once the enigma of thingliness is given its place, the influence of its own non-intentional inherencies can be recognized. Derrida is particularly interested in the virtual or spectral manifestations of things and the affective power they possess. In the background of each thing, das Ding resides, and with it, the force to call forth the real.
Open Access
"Was bedeutet der Stein?": Fetishism, Profanation, and Parody in Fontane's Grete Minde
(University of Oregon, 2015) Weitzman, Erica
This article explores the function of the precarious (non-)significance of the thing in Theodor Fontane’s 1879 novella Grete Minde. On the surface a simple tale of exclusion and revenge in seventeenth-century Brandenburg and a seeming anomaly in Fontane’s oeuvre, the novella also contains a barely visible leitmotif of the agency of things on the cusp of their disempowerment, not to say fall into vulgar parody and obscene joke. This article reads the status of the thing in Grete Minde not only as a key to some of the text’s more curious narrative choices, but also as a mark of the persistence of the ontological and aesthetic questions of the Reformation and as Fontane’s ambivalent self-reflection on the task of the novelist in the modern era.
Open Access
Speculative Fetishism
(University of Oregon, 2015) McNulty, Tracy
Quentin Meillassoux, like his mentor Alain Badiou, is sometimes accused by his critics of “fetishizing mathematics.” Without embracing the negative judgment implied in such a charge, this essay asks: what might be gained by taking seriously the link between fetishism and speculative philosophy? The claim that Meillassoux “fetishizes” mathematics potentially reveals something fundamental not only about the formalism at the heart of his speculative realism (whose “glaciality,” inanimacy, or inhuman character might sustain a certain disavowal, namely of “finitude” or castration) but about fetishism itself, whose philosophical character is attested not only by its ideality or relation to the absolute, but by its concern with thought or construction. The aim of this essay is thus not to dwell at length on the work of Meillassoux, but rather to think about the “speculative realism” specific to fetishism itself, and its unique contribution to speculative philosophy.
Open Access
"Innocent Objects:" Fetishism and Melancholia in Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence
(University of Oregon, 2015) Hoffmann, Eva
In this article, I place Orhan Pamuk's novel The Museum of Innocence into dialogue with Sigmund Freud's theory of the fetish. As Gerhard Neumann argues, the fetish provides the basic pattern for the modern subject and its experience of self and the world while performing the impossibility of narrating this experience, In a similar vein, the fetishized objects described in the novel and put on display in Pamuk's actual museum in Istanbul complicate the narrator's account of a lost love relationship. The fetish objects create an intertwinement of coalescing and contradicting narratives that point to "black melancholia" as a deeply ambiguous feeling in the collective memory of Istanbul and its people.

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