derrida

Jacques Derrida famously asserts, “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality” (Of Grammatology 5). When writing of the ‘future’ here, Derrida points to a way of thinking “beyond the closure of knowledge,” which is to say an absolute danger inasmuch as it betrays all that is by welcoming an unknown and as yet unthought is not. N. Katherine Hayles proclaims electronic literature the future of literature on the strength of its capacity to keep pace with a ‘new’ digital normality, to anchor a new structural center for 21st century literature and safeguard against an otherwise imposing and dangerous future for study in the humanities—a very different ‘danger’ than one to which Derrida alludes. The overarching purpose of this project is to engage the question, “What is electronic literature?” and while readily conceding the force of advancing technologies bring to bear broadly on the production, distribution, and consumption of literature, the thrust of the argument resists conflating “literature” with its medium or delivery technology. Chapter one reorients the question of electronic literature by focusing first on the more anterior question, “What is literature?”—remembering Derrida’s caution in pursuing any ontological delimitation and drawing on the work of Peggy Kamuf among others to assist in parsing a response. Chapter two considers what is essentially new in electronic literature and argues against Hayles’s accounting of media specificity as it underwrites new configurations of literarity. Chapter three attends the question of literarity in the form of ‘monsters’ and reads James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside The Unknown (Scott Rettberg et al. 1999), asking if and in what ways linguistic practices marking Ulysses a definitive act of “literature” can be found at play in electronic literature as well.

For Daniel Punday, Bernard Siegert’s historical materialism - a difficult synthesis of historical, literary, and institutional analysis - falls somewhere between Derrida and Foucault. But see also the review in ebr by historian Richard John, who considers Siegert in the line of Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Harold Innis.

Linda Brigham works through Embodying Technesis by Mark Hansen.

On posthumanism potentially worthy of the name.

Tim Keane reviews Genet’s republished Prisoner of Love, a ‘mirror-memoir’ in which Genet sees Palestine from the inside in an attempt to see himself from the outside.

Cary Wolfe reviews Luc Ferry’s The New Ecological Order.

Early on in The New Ecological Order, French philosopher Luc Ferry characterizes the allure and the danger of ecology in the postmodern moment. What separates it from various other issues in the intellectual and political field, he writes, is that it can call itself a true “world vision,” whereas the decline of political utopias, but also the parcelization of knowledge and the growing “jargonization” of individual scientific disciplines, seemed to forever prohibit any plan for the globalization of thought… At a time when ethical guide marks are more than ever floating and undetermined, it allows the unhoped-for promise of rootedness to form, an objective rootedness, certain of a new moral ideal (xx).

As we shall see, for Ferry – a staunch liberal humanist in the Kantian if not Cartesian tradition – this vision conceals a danger to which contemporary European intellectuals are especially sensitive: not holism, nor even moralism, exactly, but that far more charged and historically freighted thing, totalitarianism.

Ken Hirschkop questions whether poststructuralism andself-referentiality offer workable alternatives to the military ‘WorldTarget’ that, according to Rey Chow, provides the framework forknowledge production in Departments of Comparative Literary Studies.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/transitive)

An overview of Gregory Ulmer’s thought by Victor Vitanza.

1. How do we not know we think, yet think?

Gregory Ulmer (a.k.a. ‘Glue’) has been for some time developing a theory of invention that would be appropriate and productive for those cultural theorists who have an interest in electronic media. (Invention, classically defined in oral and print culture, is the art of recalling and discovering what it is that one would think or say about a given subject. In electronic culture, invention takes on new ramifications). In his Applied Grammatology (1985), Ulmer moves from Derridean deconstruction (a mode of analysis that concentrates on inventive reading) to grammatology (a mode of composition that concentrates on inventive writing); that is, he moves towards exploring “the nondiscursive levels - images and puns, or models and homophones - as an alternative mode of composition and thought applicable to academic work, or rather, play.

Linda Brigham hypercontextualizes contemporary philosophy.

Although a hard-copy book and a hypertext essay hardly present us with apples and oranges, this particular pair troubles the work of comparison. This trouble is not simply a matter of form. Content-wise as well, Arkady Plotnitsky’s interdisciplinary exploration of poststructural metaphysics (or “meta-physics”) and David Kolb’s meditation on the textuality of philosophy relate to each other in a fashion at once too intimate and divergent. Like Blake’s Clod and Pebble from the Songs of Experience, they are contraries, or, to pick up the theme, “complementary.” As Blake would insist, though, it is through such contraries that progress happens.