en

Russell Ford

2013

OpenAlex

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes In Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France, Vila argues that the concept of “sensibility” served as a “conceptual metaphor” that, in part, was used by thinkers such as Rousseau and Tissot to argue that “the physical and moral realms of human existence were closely interrelated” (4). Laqueur's Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation similarly shows that moral and physical health were inseparable for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mason describes Calder's work as “an examination of post-human society through the mapping of Enlightenment male discourses of power and desire in opposition to new cyborg desires” (110). Latham describes the Dead trilogy (taken together with Calder's subsequent novel, Cytherea) as “the most potent popular-culture illustration to date of the critical power of the vampire-cyborg, the ability of this dialectical metaphor to capture at once the transformative longings and the binding limitations of capitalist consumer culture” (251). In “Finis” Derrida writes that the aporia “is a matter of what, in sum, appears to block our way or to separate us in the very place where it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem … There, in sum, in this place of aporia, there is no longer any problem” (12). In Calder's parable, the trajectory of Ignatz ends not in formulating and responding to a reframed problem of pornography but in precipitating the reader into an aporetic experience of the sexual other that has, to borrow from Jung, previously been hidden behind a projection. Derrida writes of aporetic experience that it “concerns the choice between the relation to an other who is its other (that is to say, an other that can be opposed in a couple) and the relation to a wholly, non-opposable, other, that is, an other that is no longer its other” (18). Fusing Derrida and Jung, Calder uses Ignatz to carry the reader to the point where sexual desire is experienced as a relation of responsibility to an other person who is wholly different from one's projected unconscious (collective or otherwise) fantasies. For instance, Melzer finds Calder's Dead Girls useful to feminist theory because it “poses questions of possible female posthuman subjectivities.” However, because she does not follow Calder's text beyond the first volume of his trilogy, she concludes that “his writing seems to join other cyberpunk fictions in their reinscription of Western narratives” (184, 216). Tatsumi links Calder's work to Donna Haraway's and argues that it is a kind of “cyborg-feminism” that depicts the “greatest potentiality of nanotech, or … picotech … to undermine the myriad ideologies of domination” (96). See, for instance, the discussion in Dead Girls where it is revealed that the desire-plague is the result of an attempt to retrieve a particular idealized past (99). “Conceptual persona” is Deleuze and Guattari's term for the emergent actuality of a philosophical concept, a literary tool that is used to work out (rather than represent) the creation of concepts. Importantly, a conceptual persona differs from a character insofar as the latter transmits concepts formed anterior to the text while the former is an instantiation of thought that acquires consistence only retroactively (61–83). The name Ignatz is drawn from two sources. The most obvious is the character Ignatz Mouse from the cartoon series Krazy Kat, known principally for returning Krazy's infatuation with a thrown brick. The other source is the puppeteer in Meyerink's The Golem. In a crucial scene, the narrator describes Zwakh's “simple life” as follows: “it suddenly seemed monstrous, even uncanny, that someone like him … should have suddenly returned to the shabby puppet booths and fairgrounds of his ancestors, putting the same puppets with which they had made their meager living through the same clumsy movements and acting out the same threadbare plots. I realized that he was unable to abandon them. They were part of his life, and when he was far away from them, they changed into thoughts which lodged in his mind and made him unsettled and restless until he returned home. That is why he looked after them so lovingly and proudly dressed them up in their tawdry finery” (57). Morganstern is a slightly altered form of the German “Morgenstern,” “morning star,” the German equivalent of “Lucifer.”. Calder repeatedly emphasizes pornography as a production of surfaces, a kind of theater without depth. Near the end of Dead Things, Lipstick says to Ignatz/Archangel, “You were a thing. Like me. I'm a thing too. A psychoid. We've both been willing players in the theater of cruelty” (377). By acquiring a history, Meta would cease to function as an ideology. For Althusser (who pays particular attention to the non-historical nature of ideology), ideology cannot have a history because the process by which individuals are interpellated as specific kinds of subjects by an imaginary narrative is eternal (127–86). In Calder's trilogy, the challenge for Ignatz is to attain an individuality not always already compromised by Meta's interpellation. Much like Calder, Levinas sees birth as a moment of radical or absolute discontinuity: “Both my own and non-mine, a possibility of myself but also a possibility of the other, of the Beloved, my future does not enter into the logical essence of the possible. The relation with such a future, irreducible to the power over possibles, we shall call fecundity” (267). Meta, the desire-plague of pornography, is a particular instantiation of the anima, the dramatic projection of the feminine aspect of the (collective) unconscious. To this projection is paired a masculine aspect, the animus, and Jung writes—in a passage that could just as easily be found in Calder's trilogy—“when animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction” (15). In addition to these two aspects of the collective unconscious, Calder makes use of a third, the shadow. The shadow is an aspect of the psyche that consists of unrecognized negative emotion. The Jungian analytic process consists of a sort of individual recapitulation of the hero's descent into Hades, with the analysand first encountering and reconciling themselves with the shadow, or the personal unconscious, then passing on to a recognition of animus or anima, and then passing back up into consciousness. Calder's trilogy uses Ignatz as an affective vehicle (because the shadow is affective/emotional) to carry the reader into the Decadent anima and then back up into conscious life. Apokatastasis is a Christian term meaning “restitution,” or “restoration,” but that is sometimes used to mean “universal reconciliation.”. Maurice Blanchot describes the anonymous space opened by literature as one in which “[language] speaks, but without any beginning. It states, but does not refer back to something which is to be stated, something silent, like the meaning behind an expression, which would guarantee it” (Space 51). This space is one of hope, but not hope for a determinate future. “Hope is true hope insofar as it aspires to give us, in the future of a promise, what is. What is is presence. But hope is only hope. There is hope when, far from any present grasp, far from any immediate possession, it relates to what is always yet to come, and perhaps will never come; hope says the hoped-for coming of what exists as yet only in hope” (Infinite 41). Calder's trilogy concludes, at the end of a cascade of displacements both figurative and textual, with the invocation of a space that is not organized by an anterior desire. To conclude with a desire for a narrative world without pornography, in which desire is refashioned in some idealized way, would invite the return of the same sort of projected fantasies, would merely culminate in a new iconology. The lesson of Calder's parable is that pornography can be resisted only through the vigilant repetition of a virtual space that holds desire free for its actualizations. “The community of those who have nothing in common” is Lingis's title for his intervention in a discussion of community begun by Blanchot and continued by Nancy. Nancy, while largely sympathetic to Blanchot's contention that writing is able to clear the way for a community that is open to the radical possibilities of its constituents, argues against reifying the “hope” that Blanchot describes. “‘Literature,’ thought as the interruption of myth, merely communicates—in the sense that what it puts into play, sets to work and destines to unworking, is nothing but communication itself, the passage from one to another, the sharing of one by the other. What is at stake in literature is not just literature: in this, it is unlike myth, which communicates only itself, communicating its communion” (65). Nancy's emphasis on community stresses that writing is not the creation of a determinate community, but the sharing of a space that makes community possible. Additional informationNotes on contributorsRussell FordRussell Ford is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmhurst College. He is the translator of Pierre Klossowski's Such a Deathly Desire (2007) and the editor of Why So Serious?(2014), a collection of essays on comedy and philosophy.

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