Trumpestilence

Since the contributions to this Special Issue consist of relatively brief statements, the Editorial Board of Konturen has decided to forego abstracts this time around. Please click on "html" or "pdf" below for the full document of this essay.

“From New Class Critique to White Nationalism: Telos, the Alt Right, and the Origins of Trumpism”

Since the contributions to this Special Issue consist of relatively brief statements, the Editorial Board of Konturen has decided to forego abstracts this time around. Please click on "html" or "pdf" below for the full document of this essay.

No Accounting for Taste

Since the contributions to this Special Issue consist of relatively brief statements, the Editorial Board of Konturen has decided to forego abstracts this time around. Please click on "html" or "pdf" below for the full document of this essay.

"Broad-Shouldered” Rhetoric: The Trump Era and the Peculiar Contempt for Words

Since the contributions to this Special Issue consist of relatively brief statements, the Editorial Board of Konturen has decided to forego abstracts this time around. Please click on "html" or "pdf" below for the full document of this essay.

Sovereignty and the Cult of Immediacy

Since the contributions to this Special Issue consist of relatively brief statements, the Editorial Board of Konturen has decided to forego abstracts this time around. Please click on "html" or "pdf" below for the full document of this essay.

Mexico, Immigration, and Trump: Towards Transborder Thinking

Since the contributions to this Special Issue consist of relatively brief statements, the Editorial Board of Konturen has decided to forego abstracts this time around. Please click on "html" or "pdf" below for the full document of this essay.

No Joke: Trump and Humor

Since the contributions to this Special Issue consist of relatively brief statements, the Editorial Board of Konturen has decided to forego abstracts this time around. Please click on "html" or "pdf" below for the full document of this essay.

“Innocent Objects:” Fetishism and Melancholia in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence

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.

The Freudian Thing and the Ethics of Speech

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.

Rilke, Phenomenology, and the Sensuality of Thought

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.