Le pas encore au-delà

La phénoménologie dans son Idée même accomplit un pas au-delà de l'attitude naturelle. Mais la phénoménologie française semble aller plus loin encore et se porter aux limites de cette Idée. On cherchera dans cet article à dégager quelques traits communs à des oeuvres par ailleurs très diverses, comme peuvent peuvent l'être les phénoménologies de Jean--Luc Marion et de Maurice Blanchot

O traço em Ana Hatherly – a letra do desenho, o desenho da letra / The trace in Ana Hatherly – the letter of the drawing, the drawing of the letter

Resumo: Neste artigo, investigam-se o pensamento do gesto e a presença do traço como elementos comuns às obras visuais e aos poemas de Ana Hatherly. A reflexão se fundamenta em textos teóricos da autora, em um ensaio de Gonçalo Tavares a respeito da presença do traço nas palavras e nas imagens, no conceito de “escritura”, extraído de O império dos signos, de Roland Barthes, e no conceito de “anacrusa”, tal como formulado por Maurice Blanchot. Por fim, demonstra-se a indissociabilidade entre palavras e imagens nas anotações de sonhos presentes no livro Anacrusa, de Ana Hatherly, além de se delimitar os efeitos da reinvenção da leitura formulada pela autora ao longo de sua obra.Palavras-chave: Traço; Letra; Imagem; Leitura.Abstract: In this paper, the gesture thinking and the presence of the trace are investigated as common elements to Ana Hatherly’s visual works and poems. The reflection is based on the author’s theoretical texts, in an essay by Gonçalo Tavares about the presence of the trace in words and images, in the concept of “writing”, extracted from Roland Barthes The Empire of the Signs, and in the concept of “anacrusa”, as formulated by Maurice Blanchot. Finally, it demonstrates the inseparability between words and images in the dream notes present in the book Anacrusa, by Ana Hatherly, in addition to delimiting the effects of the reinvention of reading formulated by the author throughout her work.Keywords: Trace; Letter; Image; Reading.

Verão no aquário e Fazes-me falta: considerações sobre a escrita em Lygia Fagundes Telles e Inês Pedrosa

Este artigo objetiva dialogar os romances Verão no aquário, de Lygia Fagundes Telles, e Fazes-me falta, de Inês Pedrosa, na perspectiva da linguagem literária. Parte-se da hipótese de que esta categoria apresenta-se como errante e impotente para esclarecer o que diz, constatação que não é vista como problemática, apenas como composição do estilo peculiar das escritoras. Segundo a crítica, estes romances são significativos na consagração de ambas, consideração que se justifica, principalmente, pela irreverência da linguagem neles trabalhada. A análise foi fundamentada em contribuições voltadas ao estudo da literatura contemporânea, em especial, Maurice Blanchot (1997; 1987) e Roland Barthes (1984; 2011). Para compreender as acepções feitas pela crítica, foram consultados, dentre outros, os trabalhos de Diana Navas e Telma Ventura (2018); Sônia Régis (1998). Constatou-se que a linguagem, nestas obras, é entrelaçada à ideia de morte, tema presente nos dois enredos e que comunga com a escritura das autoras.

Reconsidering The World Republic of Letters: A Qualunque Community of Literatures

In the preface to the English edition of The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova focuses on the existence of a literary world/universe, which maintains a relative autonomy from the world and its political disparities and restrictions. This suggested ideal of a literary space is an attempt to posit world literature as an alternative chronotope in which literary production can survive and multiply transnationally. My paper will offer a reconsideration of this global literary space, read via a philosophical perspective, shaped by the famous discussion of the common and community as conducted by Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, among others. Within the above theoretical frame, my attempt will be to reread Casanova’s contribution to World Literature as a desired community of literature(s), formed by the coming together of qualunque singularities which co-exist and co-belong without “any representable condition of belonging” (Agamben). Furthermore, the idea of qualunque (whatever) will constitute the starting point for the ethico-political reconsideration and reconceptualisation of the global literary space offered by Casanova, not only without borders but also without hierarchies.

Hypochondriacal Reading: Phantom Illness and Literature

An essay about hypochondria, past and present. Beginning with the observation that for centuries hypochondria has been blamed upon various forms of reading, I attempt to take seriously this venerable relationship between hypochondria and literature. By bracketing the medical and moral concerns that encumber most treatments of hypochondria, I instead seek to understand the condition as a method of reading, a close textual engagement that is at once anxious and oddly clear-sighted about its own limits, and which bears some similarities to other, more familiar hermeneutic methods such as paranoid reading and ‘too-close reading’. In the second half of the essay, I draw upon the lives and writings of Maurice Blanchot and Franz Kafka, two writers who were themselves plagued by mysterious and unexplained symptoms, and attempt to show how the imperatives of literature as understood by each writer could meaningfully be described as hypochondriacal. Above all, then, this essay looks more closely at a figure whom it is difficult to take seriously, and asks whether, viewed from a certain angle, the hypochondriac might in fact be said to be endowed with a perspicuous if discomfiting form of insight.

Toward a Foucauldian Literary Criticism

The article argues for the renewed relevance of Foucault's early essays on literature, written throughout the 1960s, given a return to anthropological reflection in so much literary theory today (especially through affect theory and “new” phenomenologies—both of which rely on older categories supplied by psychoanalysis). On one hand, Foucault reminds us of all the “warped and twisted forms of reflection” that arise from anthropological thought, with its assumptions regarding the “unthought” and the hidden structures of sense and perception. This same Foucault, on the other hand, is deeply engaged with literature; his writings on a range of authors—from Homer and Cervantes, to Friedrich Hölderlin and the Marquis de Sade, to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot—constitute nothing less than an oeuvre. And yet, despite proposals to move beyond Foucauldian critique and its orthodoxy in literary studies today, hardly anything has been thought or said about this body of work in which Foucault, as David Carroll points out, “has the most to say about literature and language.” This lacuna is all the more surprising, since Foucault's early essays offer a rich and fruitful understanding of the being of literature as more than a limpid reflection of the body. In his reading of Bataille and Blanchot in particular, Foucault offers a unique vision of literature that is neither suspicious nor negative but that, in connection with his well-known critique of finitude, culminates in a hopeful call for openness.

‘La Main négative’: Limit-Case and Primal Scene of Art

Negative handprints or hand-stencils, which occur in many prehistoric sites around the world, occupy a particular place in accounts of rock art. Although they frequently occur alongside paintings, their indexical status as imprints leads them to be treated separately from other types of representations that are more easily accepted as such. This article argues that the negative handprint operates as a kind of limit-case for definitions of art. I examine how it has given rise to imagined scenarios of making — what we might call primal scenes of art — by writers including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Marguerite Duras. While its logic of presence invites us to think about it as a point of origin, a trace that connects us to our earliest human ancestors, I show how it can be read against that logic of presence through the lens of one particular ‘primal scene’, that imagined by Jean-Luc Nancy. In this reading, it is precisely the question of absence or distance that gives the handprint its status as a point of origin that undoes the very idea of origins.

De ninguém a outrem: dialética e mimese, judaísmo e humanismo a partir de Blanchot e Adorno

O presente artigo procura aproximar os pensamentos de Theodor Adorno e Maurice Blanchot em torno do problema do humanismo. O eixo da conversa entre os filósofos é o que podemos continuar chamando com Marx de “questão judaica”. Parte-se da intuição blanchotiana da indestrutibilidade do homem e do papel do judaísmo na revelação de uma relação exorbitante entre os homens em virtude da presença de Outrem, investigando-se em seguida o papel aparentemente contrário do judaísmo na dialética do esclarecimento de Adorno e Horkheimer. Neste percurso, dois pontos se destacam: a crítica à dialética hegeliana, mas também a reabilitação da dialética como antídoto contra a regressão do esclarecimento; e o potencial humanista retido no conceito de mimese, sobretudo na obra adorniana, o qual também possibilita a ressignificação do judaísmo no âmbito da dialética do esclarecimento.