The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, IronyStanford University Press, 2000 - 219 pages Marlene Dietrich had the last line in Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil: "What does it matter what you say about other people?" The author ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself? She wonders why the requirement to be a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own subject. She decides that some hesitations and awkwardness in inhabiting many categories of the person--including those celebrated by what is sometimes termed identity politics--need not evidence either psychological weakness or political lack of nerve. Neither an "identity" nor a "nonidentity" can quite convince. But if this discomfort inhering in self-characterization needs to be fully admitted and registered--as something that is simultaneously linguistic and affective--it can also be cheerfully tolerated. Here language is not treated as a guileful thing that leads its speakers astray. Though the business of being called something, and of being positioned by that calling, is often an unhappy affair, irony can offer effective therapy. Even if uncertain and volatile categorizations do trouble the politics that they also shape, they hardly weaken the empathetic solidarity that is distinct from identification. The verbal irony of self-presentation can be politically helpful. Questioning the received diction of the self cannot be dismissed merely as a luxury of those in secure positions, but instead can move toward a conception of a constructive nonidentity. This extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary social politics also considers the lyrical "I" and linguistic emotionality, the historical status of irony, and the possibilities of a nonidentitarian solidarity that is unapologetically alert to the affect of language. |
Table des matières
1 | |
Who me? Selfdescriptions linguistic affect | 22 |
Linguistic unease | 56 |
Lyric selves | 93 |
The Wounded Fall in the Direction of Their Wound | 113 |
Echo irony and the political | 146 |
Notes | 187 |
Index | 213 |
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Expressions et termes fréquents
Althusser Althusser's ambiguous amor fati bad faith become called characterise claim Concept of Irony critical Deleuze Denise Riley diction Echo effect emotion enacted essay ethical feel Frank O'Hara Friedrich Friedrich Nietzsche G. W. F. Hegel Gilles Deleuze grammar guage guilt Hegel Ibid idea identification identity impersonal interpellation ironic ironist irony's Jacques Lacan Jacques Rancière Judith Butler Kierkegaard language Lecercle linguistic live Logic of Sense London lyric means metaphor Narcissus Nietzsche Nietzsche's notion once one's oneself original perhaps person philosophy poem poet poetic poetry political politicisation psychology question R. J. Hollingdale realise recognise reiteration retrospective rhetorical rhyme Schlegel seduction self-description simply Slavoj Žižek social solidarity someone sound speak speaker speech strange structure syntax temporality terpellated there's thing thought tion trans truth unconscious unease University Press utterance verbal voice words wound writing Zygmunt Bauman
Fréquemment cités
Page 116 - This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.
Page 195 - But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.
Page 78 - ... transforms' the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!
Page 65 - Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
Page 116 - If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?
Page 46 - The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language.
Page 78 - Hey, you there!' One individual (nine times out of ten it is the right one) turns round, believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for him, ie recognizing that 'it really is he' who is meant by the hailing. But in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.
Page 25 - We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done ; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.
Page 87 - And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.
Page 189 - This discourse of the other is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links.