ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Bombarded by otherness, the subjectivity springing out of the three sacred texts of the Abrahamic tradition faces influence, invasion, and inspiration from innumerable sources in the Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an. Divinity, demons, destiny, and the desert all have their way with their human targets. The inscribed combat and collaboration between these biblical humans and their biblical others continues to resonate with believers and doubters alike. The use of a variety of theoretical and imaginative strategies helps to foreground the action at this dynamic interface. Polymorphous strategies are welcome, including rhetorical criticism, literary theories, cultural studies, narratology, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, mysticism, sociology, psychology, and performance studies.

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This seminar will explore examples of sacrifice in literature in order to better understand how the human relationship to violence has been structured in a variety of ancient and modern contexts. Papers may discuss theoretical approaches to the issue of sacrifice or literary examples of ritual violence, heroism, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and punishment. Does sacrifice present a particularly human way of dealing with violence? Does sacrifice provide an incitement to violence or a humanizing of violence? How does sacrifice connect a narrative to notions of the sacred?

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This seminar seeks to explore the effects of reaching the limits of Western epistemological and ontological discourses. The effects we have in mind encompass the storytelling function at work across the Western humanities: history, literature, philosophy, linguistics, film, etc. Our theoretical aim would be to collapse the various disciplines of the Western humanities into the same, which is to say, into the spacing of Derridean differance. We seek papers that solicit and disturb the epistemological privilege that the Western Academy, through its institutional authority, grants to the various disciplines in the Humanities. Thinking also of John Nash’s Equilibrium, our intention is that if no disciplines insist on epistemological privilege, a more open and intense dialogue can take place in the space of the same, which, we would insist, is a radical alterity. The notion of radical alterity we are operationalizing here outstrips the definition of the linguistic sign while at the same time giving rise to specific theoretical practices, in the Althusserian sense of this indexical expression. What kinds of positions do these theoretical practices enunciate in such disciplines as literary, cultural, and film studies? History, Philosophy, Linguistics? We look for papers that make increasingly explicit the global illocutionary force of deconstruction, the absent-present work of the erasure of the Western Humanities’ most precious concepts.

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Symptomatic reading is one of the most pervasive critical methods in literary studies. Though many literary critics disagree with the premises on which Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson based their influential theories of symptomatic reading, our disciplinary adherence to the procedures of symptomatic reading is so thorough as to go unremarked. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson defines the symptom as that “whose cause is of another order of phenomenon from its effects” (26) and states that what is most “interesting” in a text is what it represses (49). The critic’s task is “diagnostic revelation of terms or nodal points implicit in the ideological system which have, however, remained unrealized in the surface of the text” (48). Interpretation “always presupposes, if not a conception of the unconscious itself, then at least some mechanism of mystification or repression in terms of which it would make sense to seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one, or to rewrite the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code” (60). Symptomatic reading is a surface/depth model of interpretation that defines the text’s true meaning as what it does not say; the text’s gaps, silences, disruptions, and exclusions become clues to the text’s absent cause and determining structures. The critic must therefore reconstruct and reveal the “other scene” (of history, empire, sexuality, gender trouble) whose exclusion shapes the text. The purpose of this panel is to ask what other kinds of reading are possible, and what theories of interpretation and of the textual object those ways of reading imply.

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