{"title":"On Universalism","authors":"François Jullien, P. Blanchfield","doi":"10.1353/cgl.2011.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cgl.2011.0011","url":null,"abstract":"ion and the work of thought; just as the extension of law, borne by the political expansion of the roman empire, has made it the end of the community; so too the emptying of all subjects responding to the call of God made the universal the destination of the soul and the end of all humanity, etc. I ask myself whether european ideology itself was not itself birthed, more or less, from this very optical effect: from successive plans, from different and distinct pressures, which the universal aligns. not that such a universal has all along driven their collective construction, nor still that it could have organized them together—rather, the universal is that alone by which these heterogeneous plans (philosophical / political / religious) can permit to appear a perspective that is ever so slightly in common, and which furnishes them with a precious point of junction, on the horizon, for want of any other means of interlocking or penetration. For where else can we find, in an ideological context so barely as centered as that of europe, an articulation of plans otherwise so different, and which confers to them a certain cohesion, or at least a certain coherence? Whence the status of target which the universal enjoys in european thought, drawing to it every ideal (could it let them subsist anywhere else?) and always haunting the modern consciousness, such as it is, in its search for continual incarnation. an exigency that has at last become global, and by that fact above suspicion, bringing about a forgetting of its original locality, and even becoming (as it has) planetary, insofar as it is definitively hypostasized in imposing its must-be [devoir être] in the domains of value and knowledge alike: it is the universal, in particular, which has organized the necessity of reason and the becoming of History according to the same fold, and thereby made its triumph into the success of human kind itself. at the threshold of the modern era, a painting like that of the Adoration of the Mystical Lamb, by the van eyck brothers, already offers the image of this teleology","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125403644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Emergence of Modernity and the New World","authors":"G. Mazzotta","doi":"10.1353/CGL.2011.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/CGL.2011.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses about modernity. The exact point at which this modernity began has long been disputed, its purported heralds ranging from Petrarch, the \"first modern man\", who portrays man as the subject of experience, the agent of all knowledge, and the center of one's own thoughts. The chapter argues that our modern age was made possible not by one figure but by one traumatic event: the discovery of the New Worlds, which a German aristocrat, Martin Waldseemuller, called \"America.\" It highlights the tangle of elements underneath the epoch-making, decisive phenomenon of modernity: the discovery of the \"new world\" and its relationship to the \"old world.\" The chapter discusses that the discoveries of New Worlds by the likes of Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Vasco de Gama came out of the intellectual challenges and ways of thinking articulated by the Florentine Quattrocento. Keywords:Columbus; modernity; new world; old world; Petrarch","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131286013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Seeing the Future in an Image from the Past: Hannah Arendt, Garry Winogrand, and Photographing the World","authors":"U. Baer","doi":"10.1353/CGL.2011.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/CGL.2011.0000","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124719961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Must the Communist Hypothesis Be Abandoned?","authors":"A. Badiou","doi":"10.1353/cgl.2011.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cgl.2011.0014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"172 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122872119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Coexistence of the World: Or the Intertwining of Singularities","authors":"F. Raffoul","doi":"10.1353/CGL.2011.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/CGL.2011.0001","url":null,"abstract":"I would like in the following pages to engage JeanLuc Nancy’s thought of the world, and of what I chose to call “the co-existence of the world,” a co-existence exceeding the anthropological enclosure which will have to be understood as an intertwining of singularities. Indeed, as for Nancy the world is not a container or an indifferent milieu, but the very sharing of existence, one would speak of a co-existence of the world, in the subjective genitive, or better, of the world itself as co-existence. Nancy does state that everything takes place between us, but this between “has neither consistency nor continuity;”1 it is not a connective tissue, a cement, a bridge, a “connection.” The between of our co-existence is not an indifferent and external milieu: “there is no intermediate and mediating ‘milieu.’ Meaning is not a milieu in which we are immersed. There is no mi-lieu [between place].”2 Rather, the between is the stretching out of singularities, its spacing, where each singularity touches the others in a singular intertwining [entrecroisement] or interlacing [entrelacement]. Neither exteriority nor separation, but intertwining: “The intertwining of the limit and of the continuity between the several theres must determine proximity not as pure juxtaposition but as composition 1 Jean-Luc Nancy. Being Singular Plural. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 2000: 5. Hereafter cited as BSP, followed by page number.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133738045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pick a Color","authors":"Etgar Keret, Sondra Silverston","doi":"10.1353/cgl.2011.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cgl.2011.0006","url":null,"abstract":"COLUMNS T he addition of improved support for asynchronous I/O in Python 3 is one of the most significant changes to the Python language since its inception. However, it also balkanizes the language and libraries into synchronous and asynchronous factions—neither of which particularly like to interact with the other. Needless to say, this presents an interesting challenge for developers writing a program involving I/O. In this article, I explore the problem of working in an environment of competing I/O models and whether or not they can be bridged in some way. As a warning, just about everything in this article is quite possibly a bad idea. Think of it as a thought experiment. I recently read an interesting blog post \" What Color Is Your Function? \" by Bob Nystrom [1]. I'm going to paraphrase briefly, but imagine a programming language where every function or method had to be assigned one of two colors, blue or red. Moreover, imagine that the functions were governed by some rules: ◆ ◆ The way in which you call a function differs according to its color. ◆ ◆ A red function can only be called by another red function. ◆ ◆ A blue function can never call a red function. ◆ ◆ A red function can call a blue function, but unknown bad things might happen. ◆ ◆ Calling a red function is much more difficult than calling a blue function. Surely such an environment would lead to madness. What is the deal with those difficult red functions? In fact, after a bit of coding, you'd probably want to ditch all of the red code and its weird rules. Yes, you would, except for a few other details: ◆ ◆ Some library you're using has been written by someone who loves red functions. Sigh. So, those red functions really are annoying. However, you're still going to have to deal with them and their weird rules in some manner.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"258 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115334313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Genuine Correspondences: Fontane's World Literature","authors":"Bernhard J. Dotzler, C. Chiasson","doi":"10.1353/CGL.2011.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/CGL.2011.0002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"2672 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116163765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Love to Worldliness: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger","authors":"S. Boym","doi":"10.1353/CGL.2011.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/CGL.2011.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Hannah Arendt wrote that a passionate love “for a single one” can result in a “totalitarianism for two.”1 What Arendt means here is that the lovers’ crime of passion lies in obliterating the world around and in-between them. Indeed, love can obliterate worldliness but its experience can also contribute to co-creation in the world and such world-making sometimes outlasts the love-making. Experience of love can put an end to the individual autonomy of two lovers and shrink their worlds, or on the contrary, carve a new unpredictable “third space” that is never the sum of the two. “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never,” wrote Soren Kierkegaard in The Diary of the Seducer, suggesting that one’s own imagination is the most powerful aphrodisiac.2 (I am afraid many of my fellow-scholars would concur with that statement). I will examine one particular possibility in the relationship between love and freedom of the other, and explore how the break of romantic passion can give birth to a form of passionate thinking, understanding of differences, and public imagination that lies at the foundation of a ‘common world.’ Arendt’s conception of the ‘common world’ seems particularly timely today. She realized its fra1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958: 242. For a discussion of Arendt’s theory of freedom, see Svetlana Boym, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea. University of Chicago Press, 2010.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129234623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The World Of Desire: Lacan Between Evolutionary Biology and Psychoanalytic Theory","authors":"L. Chiesa","doi":"10.1353/CGL.2011.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/CGL.2011.0013","url":null,"abstract":"The primary aim of this paper is to analyse the biological foundations of Lacan's notion of desire as expounded in his first two Seminars (1953–1955). These works provide us with his most detailed discussion of the species-specific preconditions that allow homo sapiens to speak and establish symbolic pacts among individuals. Despite its irreducibility to the domain of animal instincts, human desire can only be adequately understood against the background of an evolutionary enquiry on the emergence of language, one that problematises both the implicit teleological assumptions of a certain Darwinianism and the logical consistency of an investigation of origins. Drawing on organic and anatomical evidence, Lacan postulates a primordial biological discord between man and his environment, centred on premature birth and a subsequent disorder of the imagination, from which language and the symbolic arise immanently. Desire is seen in this context as coextensive with what Lacan repeatedly refers to as \"the world of the symbol\". The key argument I intend to put forward is that the symbolic order is a world in the sense that, in always presenting itself to man as a totality, it compensates for the failure of a strictly \"natural\" relationship between man as animal and his environment. In performing this function, the symbolic also amounts to nothing else than \"human nature\" tout-court. In other words, the symbolic is an exceptional and to a certain extent autonomous pseudo-environmentthat must nevertheless be interpreted by means of biological concepts.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124868081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}