ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar proposes to investigate in historical and theoretical terms the multilingual contexts in which Yiddish literature has appeared. The vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews, Yiddish has a thousand-year history of functioning at territorial, linguistic, and cultural crossroads. A fusion language consisting of Romance, German, Slavic, and Semitic components, Yiddish throughout the modern era has excited considerable anxiety among its linguistic neighbors: it has been vilified as a thieves’ language; a degraded form of German; a linguistic symbol of irrationality and disorder; a mark of provincialism, parochialism, or Ashkenazic chauvinism; a language of the anti-Zionist left as well as the anti-modern right. In spite of these pejorative and stereotypical labels—which have been applied to Yiddish as much by Jews themselves as by antagonistic non-Jews—the Yiddish language has functioned as Ashkenazic Jewry’s primary language of mediation and cultural negotiation for nearly a millennium, and Yiddish culture for the past 150 years has produced a roving, experimental, subversive literature fully engaged with the leading modernist trends active in Europe, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel. This seminar will therefore attempt to understand Yiddish literature as an inherently multi-lingual, liminal cultural production that can only be understood fully with reference to its dialogical relationship with contemporaneous and co-territorial literary cultures. As such, it intends to demonstrate the relevance of Yiddish, as well as other local, “minor” languages, to a theoretical understanding of the politics of literary form, the self-perception of the Other, and the problematic assumptions of the Human in the age of post-Enlightenment modernity.

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This session’s papers cover a wide range of topics, all of which deal with aspects of poetry that at first sight may appear to be “in the margins” of this genre: There is what seems to be conventional ‘courtly poetry’, in the case of Shota Rustaveli’s The Man in the Panther Skin, an epic written around 1200 A.D. in Georgia. Suddenly, the convention is undercut by an encounter between a lion and a leopard which begins as a courtship but ends in mortal combat—predicting that love will eventually disappear into mortal hate. Covering a somewhat later period yet retaining the animal image, the second paper presents a comparison of European Renaissance emblem books and Taoist Chinese poetry. Both genres explore ways in which animals were used as symbolic tools to focus the readers’ minds on the ineffable and to bring them into contact with divinity. The third paper focuses on poetry from the modern period: Baudelaire’s and Gertrude Stein’s prose poems can be seen as their authors’ attempts at addressing the increasing isolation of the two poets in their world. They critique thoughtless consumption and link questions of artistic production to self-production and material culture. By choosing the genre of prose poem and refusing a generic identity, both authors can traverse realms, high art and newspaper culture, aesthetic and social phenomena, and negotiate these realms critically.

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What or who gets lost when we translate poetry of national, ethnic, or cultural others or poetry that is other? What or who gets found? In the end, is translating poetry always intransitive? Is it always other, which is to say something else than the writer’s, reader’s, and translator’s intents or interpretations? This panel seeks to explore questions of translating poetry: on the one hand the phrase describes poetry which translates its own otherness while at the same time translating experiences of l’étranger (e.g. cultural) from other to another, or from opposition to apposition as Édouard Glissant would say. On the other hand, the phrase describes the event of translating poetry as a poetry in its own right. We welcome papers which address translating the poetry of “the Other,” whether cultural, linguistic, or another historic era; comparative translations of a poem; poems about bodily or spiritual translation; poems that translate prose or vice versa, and other relevant topics. Original translations are encouraged for those papers that address works not written in English.

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According to one etymology, the English word “man” shares a root with the Latin word for hand (manus.) Handiness is not first of all a definition of the human. Rather it functions as a gesture; the hand points to the human. Yet the hand that allows the human to be pointed out by pointing toward the ability to gesture also points away from the human (and from hands). Not only do apes’ gestures ape the human, but human gesture, when it imitates the non-signifying movements of nature, poses so grave a threat to human reason that Plato has to exclude the mimetic dancer, along with the poet, from the polis. This suggests what is at stake when theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Max Kommerell, Theodore Adorno, and recently Giorgio Agamben, turn to gesture as a mode of literary criticism, or even as the emblem of criticism itself. This seminar will address the question of gesture. Is gesture a sign of the human, or does it ask the human finally to sign off? Is the living being that gestures distinct from the zōon logon exon, the living being with language? And finally, what promise does gesture hold as a figure for literary criticism, or even for thought itself?

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In light of Giorgio Agamben’s ground-breaking theory of bare life, this seminar seeks to create an interdisciplinary discourse that re-examines the politics of life and death which produce, police, and define the human in opposition to the animal. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben writes: “What is captured in the sovereign ban is a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed: homo sacer” (83). Following Michel Foucault’s concept of “bio-power” and his claim that the modern state supplants the sovereign “right of death” by the power to “make live,” Agamben suggests that in the extreme case of the state of exception, sovereign authority propels this power to “make live” to a paradoxical excess; stripping individuals of the significant markers of social and political existence, only bare life can subsist. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben further argues that the anthropological machine itself produces bare life, a life that is neither human nor animal. We invite papers that explore how the dichotomy between man and animal produces a definition of the human that calls into question the relationship between the human and the non-human. Possible topics include: Can the animal respond?; “Biopower,” animality, and humanity; Dasein, the openness to a world, and the animal; animality, voice, and performative; “bare life,” death and the human; procreation, animality, and sexual difference; human, animal, and the (war) machine.

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In light of Giorgio Agamben’ s ground-breaking theory of bare life, this seminar seeks to create an interdisciplinary discourse that re-examines the politics of life and death which produce, police, and define the human in opposition to the animal. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben writes: “What is captured in the sovereign ban is a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed: homo sacer” (83). Following Michel Foucault’s concept of “bio-power” and his claim that the modern state supplants the sovereign “right of death” by the power to “make live,” Agamben suggests that in the extreme case of the state of exception, sovereign authority propels this power to “make live” to a paradoxical excess; stripping individuals of the significant markers of social and political existence, only bare life can subsist. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben further argues that the anthropological machine itself produces bare life, a life that is neither human nor animal. We invite papers that explore how the dichotomy between man and animal produces a definition of the human that calls into question the relationship between the human and the non-human. Possible topics include: Can the animal respond?; “Biopower,” animality, and humanity; Dasein, the openness to a world, and the animal; animality, voice, and performative; “bare life,” death and the human; procreation, animality, and sexual difference; human, animal, and the (war) machine.

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As suggested by the performative force attached to the Latin “humanitas” and its semantic proximity to ideals of “civility,” “cultivation,” and “urbanity,” premodern literary cultures picture humanity less as a fact of nature than as a fact of art. Indeed, unlike the modern conception of “the human,” whose definite article presumes a kind of categorical imperative, the premodern character of humanity denotes an achievement grounded in mastery of the various arts (of love and war, conduct and conversation, policy and politesse, thought and persuasion) transmitted in the body of texts and traditions still referred to as “the humanities.” One consequence is to identify humanity with “the humanities” themselves: are fully human those (and only those) initiated in the polite culture of humanist, mandarin, or clerical learning. However, a second consequence is that, precisely because human beings make themselves so, humanity announces the family of contrasting yet intimately related modes of being from which it arises. “The human” thus stands in protean relation to what, though “more” or “less,” is never wholly “other” than that: the gods and heroes, beasts and women, madmen and barbarians, prophets and poets, hierarchs and heretics who share the wider conceptual space within which notions of humanity operate. The seminar explores the exchanges, ratios, and metamorphoses this conception makes possible. Proposals are welcome from all fields of literary and cultural study, eastern or western, dating from classical antiquity to the threshold of the global modernity inaugurated in the late 18th/early 19th centuries.

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Psychoanalysis has thoroughly transformed the traditional concept of the human. The psychoanalytic findings, such as the discovery of the unconscious, the intersubjective figuration of the self, the subject’s embeddedness in language, to name a few, continue to challenge any narrow or forcefully unifying vision of the self, transforming the social apprehension of the human as much as its aesthetic figuration. The presentations at this seminar fuse all these concerns to propose a perpetual agency of psychoanalysis in conceptualization of what it means to be a human.

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