tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post1825107821505353079..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Signs Taken as Wonders: Žižek and the Apparent InterpreterCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-70622872087275792632013-12-20T11:47:35.137-05:002013-12-20T11:47:35.137-05:00@Unknown: Thank you so much for your kind comment!...@Unknown: Thank you so much for your kind comment! I think the more we can think generously across time and space the better it is for everyone. I will note that activist work and scholarship is justifiably present-oriented and such critique should continue--I feel that it should *also* continue with a mindfulness of the past, including seemingly distant historical contexts.Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-48284604618197840112013-12-20T07:14:36.295-05:002013-12-20T07:14:36.295-05:00Thanks, Jonathan for putting foreword the charge t... Thanks, Jonathan for putting foreword the charge to "cultivate a generous understanding." I think this is one opportunity we have as scholars to reach across time and space in generative ways. It is a productive practice in the face of the current spirit of the persistent critique of the present.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01471943644742786632noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-9012690984007555662013-12-18T23:47:07.774-05:002013-12-18T23:47:07.774-05:00Thanks @Julie and @Jeffrey for your thoughtful com...Thanks @Julie and @Jeffrey for your thoughtful comments here. I think you are both picking up on what I'm trying to suggest at the end of this--the question of how we might engage in more informed modes of "thinking about what it is like" to inhabit a narrative (or rather a narrative orientation) that doesn't allow certain minds/bodies to merely "signify" (as symbol, metaphor, what you will) for something or someone else. I think what is so difficult for us (and here "us" specifically refers to people who are trained primarily as literary scholars) is how to "get out of" our default modes of interpreting the world around us -- via structuring schema of metaphor, symbolism, narrative. Julie's comment seems to go so far to show that "whatever is going on with Jantjie" is so completely alien that all Z. can do is transform J. into allegory.<br /><br />I think what's so powerful about Rosemarie's work in this regard is to shift the entire conceptual *orientation* around, to move inside/inhabit that seemingly-alien or unfathomable position and work outward from there. <br /><br />As for Kempe: I've been thinking a lot about this too. One difficultly with Kempe is how much the Book foregrounds its mediated structure -- in third person, via at least two different scribes -- so inhabiting a narrative orientation is even more challenging. Or perhaps the Book already shows us how gaining access to what is going on "inside" *any* mind or embodied experience is necessarily a heavily mediated one.<br /><br />As you both point out, I don't want to be making Jantjie into some sort of otherworldly saint here -- the reports of his participation in acts of violence are indeed disturbing. But I did feel that it was really important to "call out" Zizek for his astounding lack of engagement with the Deaf community and disability rights perspectives -- especially for as someone who *purports* to speak on behalf people who are "disadvantaged" or "marginalized."Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-15873089746800582352013-12-18T18:21:34.378-05:002013-12-18T18:21:34.378-05:00Thanks for this post, Jonathan, which I'll be ...Thanks for this post, Jonathan, which I'll be mulling for a while. I kept thinking about Margery Kempe as I read through it -- in part because of Julie Orlemanski's haunting question on FB about thinking about what it is like to be Kempe. That "thinking about what it is like" takes an act of narrative inhabitance that disallows people becoming signs, from becoming characters in a narrative assigned them by someone else. <br /><br />One of the things I love about Rosemarie's book is that it shows how that enframing can be constantly defeated when the one who is stared at stares back, when the story and its power to violently enframe rebound. So whose story does Jantjie vanish into? One from the deaf community (who have been truly slighted by not having an interpreter even vetted)? One from Zizek, who has a way of turning everything into guilt-making political allegory? One from the schizophrenic community, if such a collective can be imagined? Or is the story of angelic communication and visions that narrates irreducible, so that all the narrative processing machines in the world are not going to be able to flatten into something comfortable? I don't say that to make a heroic a figure out of him (he seems to have committed some heinous acts) but to emphasize the difficulties that inhere in turning people into signs, into stories.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-59259995220097306772013-12-17T21:54:15.461-05:002013-12-17T21:54:15.461-05:00Great post, Jonathan. Wow, what a complicated stor...Great post, Jonathan. Wow, what a complicated story -- at the intersection of categories of disability (mental illness and deafness, as you say), race, the performance of nationhood on the international stage -- and (if we zoom out to include the man whose life was being memorialized) different models of political practice -- and (if we read the latest news-stories about Jantjie like this one at Slate, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/12/16/thamsanqa_jantjie_bogus_mandela_signer_allegedly_helped_burn_men_to_death.html) violence of different kinds and at different scales. As more details become available, I am struck by how LITTLE we know about Jantjie. What to me was a "flat" spectacle (the state funeral) -- canned, staged, already saturated with the depressingly familiar logic of neo-liberal global-order-spectacle -- indeed has become much "weirder" or "crazier" (adjectives that keep being used to describe the events in news-stories). I have lots of things to say -- about Zizek's categorization of "poor, black South Africas" as properly historical actors ("the Absent One to whom Jantjie was signalling") vs. the deaf, about "robotic calm" and "aliens", about what kind of analysis would be needed to think through the actual semiotics of deaf-interpreters at televised events -- but alas, the office is closing up so I have to get off the computer. More anon!Julie Orlemanskihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07529991258830984557noreply@blogger.com