Beckett and the Sub Specie Aeternitatis Vision

This essay will consider the idea of the creation of the feeling of the ‘eternal’ in Samuel Beckett through a strange identification of temporalities that involve the immediate sensation of direct perception in the present, and idealised feelings from the past. It begins by unpacking Beckett’s comment in a letter to Thomas McGreevy of 5 March 1936 that affirms the importance of the ‘sub specie aeternitatis [from the perspective of eternity] vision’ (2009b, 318–321; Knowlson, 219). It considers Spinoza’s definitions of the ‘eternal’ and draws upon Beckett’s early essay Proust in developing readings of Beckett’s late prose works Ceiling (1981) and Stirrings Still (1989). It does this not to attempt to demonstrate Beckett’s debt to Spinoza, which remains open to question, but rather to underline how Beckett’s works, in dialogue with those of Spinoza, allow us to glimpse what is at stake in a particular idea of the eternal.

Psychical Spacings

This chapter explores the complex relationship between spatiality and the psyche in psychoanalysis and in deconstruction. For Derrida, Freud’s spatialized models of the mind are a key element in psychoanalysis’s break with the traditional ‘Platonism’ of metaphysics, explored here through the examples of Plato and Edmund Husserl. In attending to the importance of space in Derrida’s work, this chapter provides a detailed account of his well-known neologism ‘différance’. Although différance has sometimes been interpreted as a theory of time, Derrida’s engagement with the phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions highlights différance’s status as a movement of spacing (espacement), as the structural ‘co-implication’ of time and space. This co-implication is examined here through a reading of Derrida’s early essay, ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’), a text which surveys the problematic relationship between anatomical (or neurological) space and the virtual space of Freud’s metapsychology. Situating Derrida as a thinker of spatial difference and its aporias provides an important means of engaging his work with the recent ‘materialist’ turn in the humanities, represented here in Catherine Malabou’s neuroscientific challenge to deconstruction.

The Early J.S. Mill on Marriage and Divorce

This paper discusses Mill’s early essay on marriage and divorce (1832) and gives two possible sources of influence for it: Plato’s arguments on the appropriate scope of the law in book IV of his Republic and Unitarian ideas on motherhood. It demonstrates that Plato’s Republic and Mill’s essay both emphasize the crucial role of background conditions in achieving desirable social aims. Similar to Plato’s claim that the law should provide only a rough framework and not concern itself with questions of etiquette (Republic, 425d), Mill envisions a society in which men and women meet as equals and hence are in no need of marriage laws. Besides, this paper will relate Mill’s essay on marriage and divorce to Unitarian ideas on the social role of women to account for his reservations about the gainful employment of married women and mothers. Mill’s claim that the rightful employment of a mother is “the training of the affections” (Mill 1970, 76) is fueled by the Unitarian conception of women as the moral educators of future citizens.

Anxiety and Ontology: Toward the Lacanian Materialist Metapsychology of the Affect

Notwithstanding the fact that already in his early essay “The Logical Time” Lacan suggested that the “ontological form of anxiety” is the constitutive element in the process of the constitution of subjectivity, thus far there have only been rare attempts at inquiring into the relation between the affect of anxiety and Lacan’s critique of classical ontology, which this article will try to explore. Specifically, my argument will be that Lacanian anxiety, unlike, for instance, its Heideggerian variation, is inextricably connected with the third dimension of being, which amounts to what Lacan in Seminar XI labelled “the unrealized,” i.e. to the peculiar structure of the unconscious, which distorts the classical ontological opposition between being and non-being. For Lacan, the unconscious, rather than referring simply to repressed unconscious content, is instead structured around a “pre-ontological” gap (Lacan) or “ontological negativity” (Zupančič). While anxiety notoriously “does not deceive,” it does not deceive only regarding the subject’s encounter with the real, but also – and most importantly – regarding the specific ontological structure of the unconscious, which includes the negativity as its own “material cause”. In this respect, anxiety might be regarded as an “ontological” or even objective material affect – yet not in a posthumanist sense of the affect of being/matter, but rather as the affective correlate or material signal for the fracture of being itself. In short, without this specific ontological gap/negativity, there would only be fear and frustration, not anxiety, which brings anxiety into the domain of metapsychology.

Christ as Infinite and Finite: Rowan Williams’ Christ the Heart of Creation

In this splendid volume, Rowan Williams offers a modern Christology re-presenting and interpreting the Cyrillian theology as expressed in the councils of Constantinople II and III. A “single Subject” Christology is built up from Scriptural, Patristic, and Scholastic sources, drawing heavily on Maximus the Confessor, Thomas Aquinas, and Nicholas Cusanus. The conceptual framework for the whole is provided by Austin Farrer, especially in his early essay, Infinite and Finite, and in his later Bampton Lectures, The Glass of Vision. Whether a Christology adhering closely to axioms of incommensurability and non-competition between Creator and creature can undergird a fully Chalcedonian Christology is the demanding query posed at the heart of Christ the Heart of Creation.

5. Free and sociable solitude

How does Montaigne’s early essay “On Solitude” fit with his sociable nature and public profile? “Free and sociable solitude” describes the qualities of Montaigne’s ideal solitude. He argued that some withdrawal is a service that not only restores us to ourselves but improves us for our return to our colleagues and loved ones. Returning to the theme of an essential or ruling pattern, Montaigne proposed that being fully ourselves was a duty and that improving our self-knowledge and self-reliance could be an effective defense against loss or even death, as well as a welcome relief from the bureaucracy of political life and the war raging outside.

“More than Lynched”

Reading John Brown together with Black Reconstruction, Chapter 3 exposes the join of psychological and material concerns that Du Bois learns from Douglass. The anarchistic energy that Du Bois adopts to describe Brown is best articulated in Walter Benjamin’s early essay “On Violence.” As Judith Butler has argued, Benjamin borrowed the idea of the general strike from Georges Sorel to theorize a destructive power that is ironically pitched at violence itself. Such an idea matches the mesmeric notion of the “crisis state”: structurally it has a homeopathic dimension where an anticipated violence is reproduced to unmoor and undo its terror. Douglass shows his understanding of this unique destructive power when he expresses ambivalence about Brown’s invitation to join the raid on Harper’s Ferry, something Du Bois highlights by dwelling on the attention Douglass gives to Shields Green, the man who decided to “go down with the old man.”

Death and Fairy Tale

The music of the spectralist composer Claude Vivier is often considered through the lens of autobiography. However, from his abandonment as an infant to the circumstances of his murder at the age of thirty-four, certain aspects of Vivier’s life also seem to resist any straightforwardly autobiographical account. Borrowing the concept of “autothanatography” from Jacques Derrida and others, this essay explores how Vivier’s works inscribe a relationship to death, to the end and impossibility of autobiography, into its very origin. I argue that such an inscription occurs prominently in Vivier’s musical and dramatic portrayals of childhood, particularly those in Kopernikus: Opéra—Rituel de mort and Lonely Child. Drawing on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s writing on queer childhood and Lee Edelman’s early essay on homographesis, I further argue that this displacement of the autobiographical in Vivier’s works is also marked by his sexuality, or, more precisely, by its spectral repercussions.

El drama de la angustia y la experiencia religiosa en las “Vigilias: Diario de un soñador” de Octavio Paz

In spite of the early essay “Vigilias: Diario de un soñador” being an unusually commented work among Paz’s specialists, it is pertinent to consider it as an important text in order to understand the whole gestating process about one of the main topics in Paz’s work: the experience of solitude and the desire of communion. In this sense, “Diario de un soñador” could be understood as a personal process, in which Octavio Paz revealed his own religious search, sometimes as a vacuum experience, others, as plenty of anguish.

Consumer Semiotics

Although structural semiotics has origins in the dual disciplines of communication science and anthropology, many commercial semioticians limit their practice to the analysis of texts such as advertising, popular media, and cultural phenomena, to the exclusion of consumer research. Some practicing semioticians even advertise that semiotics does not apply to consumer behavior. However, a cursory look at the academic literature makes it clear that the object of semiotics is not limited to textual analysis, but applies to a wide range of human experiences, including social organization (Hodge and Kress 1988), cinema spectating (Metz [1976] 1981), the flow of traffic in a mall (Oswald 2015), and even animal behavior (Sebeok 1972). Furthermore, in the course of twenty years of consulting to blue chip companies, it is clear that the object of semiotics is not limited to textual analysis, but also applies to a wide range of marketing factors including consumer-centered design strategy, cultural branding, and media planning. This chapter illustrates how semiotics can be applied to standard qualitative research methods to gain deeper insights, encourage respondent creativity, and improve the consistency and validity of findings for the client. Christian Pinson contributes an early essay on marketing semiotics research.