In groundbreaking readings linking works of Descartes, Shakespeare,
and Cervantes with contemporary revisions of Freud and Nietzsche,
"Unspeakable Subjects" argues that the concepts and discourses that
have come to define European modernity--the subject's extension and
responsibility, genealogies of intention and of freedom, the
literary, legal, and medical construction of the body, among
others--arise as strategies for evading a profound redefinition of
the nature of "events" in early modern Europe.
Negotiating the often competing claims of rhetorical reading and
cultural analysis, Lezra reassesses the grounds of literary and
philosophical history as a materialist practice of eventful
reading. His original accounts of "Don Quixote," Descartes's
"Second Meditation" and "Regulae," and "Measure for Measure" tack
between linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural materialist
approaches to define and discuss the double aspect of the event in
early modern literature and philosophy, and in Freudian and
Heideggerian critical discourse: the event is at once an accident,
the unpredictable, deontic intrusion of the empirical in idealizing
schemes, "and" the disclosing and recollecting of a subject's
relation to discursive and cultural morphologies in which empirical
events are said properly to take place.
The advent of "modernity," "Unspeakable Subjects" argues, arises as
the novel account of the permanently interrupted negotiation
between the event's deontic and its morphological aspects. If
"Unspeakable Subjects" considers on this level the "singularities"
of textual events, it also seeks to show their complex relation to
the "singularities" of the forms given material history.
Drawing upon such varied sources as the proclamations of James I,
the law of entail, Renaissance treatises on typography, and
documents on Jacobean and Elizabethan privateering, as well as
accounts of the "events" of May 1968 and of Lacan's treatment of
the "fort-da" game, and of the cultural uses of the figure of Don
Quixote in Spanish proto-Falangist thought, the author shows that
the institutional setting and conditions for literary and
philosophical speech-acts, and the graphic constraints upon the
bodies that such acts support, also take shape according to
patterns set in response to the instability of the event.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
