Synopsis
The polysemous German word Geschlecht -- denoting gender, genre, kind, kinship, species, race, and somehow also more -- exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the translational, transdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational structures of the contemporary humanities: What happens when texts, objects, practices, and concepts are transferred or displaced from one language, tradition, temporality, or form to another? What is readily transposed, what resists relocation, and what precipitate emerges as distorted or new?
Drawing on Barbara Cassin's transformative remarks on untranslatability, and the activity of "philosophizing in languages," scholars contributing to The Geschlecht Complex examine these and other durable queries concerning the ontological powers of naming, and do so in the light of recent artistic practices, theoretical innovations, and philosophical incitements. Combining detailed case studies of concrete "category problems" in literature, philosophy, media, cinema, politics, painting, theatre, and the performing arts with a range of indispensable excerpts from canonical texts -- by notable, field-defining thinkers such as Apter, Cassin, Cavell, Derrida, Irigaray, Malabou, and Nancy, among others -- the volume presents "the Geschlecht complex" as a condition to become aware of, and in turn, to companionably underwrite any interpretive endeavor.
Historically grounded, yet attuned to the particularities of the present, the Geschlecht complex becomes an invaluable mode for thinking and theorizing while ensconced in the urgent immediacy of pressing concerns, and poised for the inevitable complexities of categorial naming and genre discernment that await in the so often inscrutable, translation-resistant twenty-first century.
About the Author
Oscar Jansson is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of Graham Greene and the Conditions of 20th Century Literature and articles on modern literature and media, ranging from the aesthetics of national romanticism to affective modes of satire in contemporary fiction.
David LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor of more than a dozen books, with several of them from Bloomsbury, including Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor, Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene, The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed, Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, and The Geschlecht Complex: Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology. He studied rhetoric at Berkeley, served as Harvard’s Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom, participated in an NEH Institute and the School of Criticism and Theory. He has taught philosophy, rhetoric, and cinema, and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, the New York Public Library, the School of Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt. www.DavidLaRocca.org
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