Medievalism, Authenticity, Idées folles

by J J Cohen

Ana Grinberg sent me this link: a 13th century castle is rising in Burgundy, the self-professed "insane idea" of Michel Guyot: "Whenever time allows, he makes every effort to try and hold back the ravages of time."

In his quixotic desire for the full restoration of an authentic past -- the one that ruinous time keeps stealing away -- Guyot seems a nostalgist of the first degree. The Middle Ages portrayed on the castle's website is rather fairy-tale like, a pre-Industrial idyll:

Guédelon is a journey back in time. Step over the threshold into the heart of a by-gone age. No harsh mechanical sounds, no engines running; just a natural environment that elevates the senses. Explore the site to the sound of metal on stone, the sawing of wood, horses' hooves on bare earth and the hammer striking the anvil; become totally immersed in the 13^th Century.

But it is perhaps too easy to dismiss the whole project as hopeless romanticism, too easy to point out that this castle is being erected by volunteers, scholars, and laborers who enjoy protections, safeguards and comforts not available to those who worked 13th C stone. This mortar won't have so much violence, so much blood mixed within. Yet to dismiss Guédelon so breezily would also be to dismiss the medievalist impulse within contemporary culture. So, yes, the project is an impossible one (the 13th C Guédelon represents didn't exist, isn't coming back, reveals perhaps more about 2009 than 1409). And yet I am not sure so sure the idea is so crazy as I initially wanted to make it.

PS Compare, from the early days of the blog, this discussion.

Messianic Time and the Untimely

by J J Cohen

If you are in DC in mid-September, or want to be .....

Please join us on Thursday September 17 at 4PM for our inaugural event of the 2009-10 year, a seminar entitled

"Messianic Time and the Untimely"

Three papers will be pre-circulated by email on September 1, and should be read in advance by all who plan to participate. On September 17, we will have short presentations followed by open discussion. The presenters are:

1. Kathleen Biddick, "Dead Neighbor Archives and Messianic Time"
2. Julia Lupton, "Paul Shakespeare: Exegetical Exercises"
3. Jonathan Gil Harris, ""The Untimely Mammet of Verona"

The event is free and welcomes all who would like to attend, but space is limited and preregistration is required. To reserve a space and receive the papers in advance, email Lowell Duckert as soon as possible: lduckert@gwu.edu

The seminar will be held in the conference room of the English Department of the George Washington University (Room 771, 801 22nd Street NW Washington DC 20052).

March 2009 PMLA: Best Ever?

by J J Cohen

Though the MLA website is so poorly maintained that the January 2009 issue of PMLA is listed as the most recent -- and information there about the journal's contents is, to say the least, skimpy -- medievalist will want to ensure that they grab a copy of the March 2009 issue (volume 124 number 2). Mine just arrived at my office, and for once I think I'll be reading most of the thing.

A guest column on "Why Animals Now?" by Marianne DeKoven kicks the issue off. Then comes a Victorian Cluster which looks quite interesting ... followed by a Theories and Methodologies cluster on Animal Studies with contributions like "The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human" (Laurie Shannon); "Zoos, the Academy, and Captivity" (Nigel Rothfels), "Literary Animal Agents" (Susan McHugh); "Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Things" (Rosi Braidotti); "Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World" (Neel Ahuja) -- and many more, as the saying goes. The Changing Profession column features Cary Wolfe on animal studies and the humanities.

Next a second Theories and Methodologies cluster devoted to "Medieval Studies in the Twenty-First Century." Contributions include Peggy McCracken (on the crusades and romance narratives of captivity); Karla Mallette (Aristotle and the medieval Mediterranean -- the ocean that seems to be this cluster's "In" destination); Karma Lochrie (Mandeville, cosmopolitanism, and provincializing Europe); Sharon Kinoshita ("Medieval Mediterranean Literature"); Steven Justice (on D. W. Robertson's critical fate); Bruce Holsinger (animals and the material conditions of medieval writing; Karl Steel makes an appearance in this one); Christine Chism (medieval Arabic); Jessica Brantley (the book's "prehistory"); and Josiah Blackmore (melancholy and desire in the Coita d'Amor). Immediately evident to the Anglo_saxonists among this blog's readers will be the utter absence of their field: the Middle Ages of the issue is temporally not very deep, even if geographically capacious.

I've done no more than skim the issue, but can hardly wait to spend some time with the essays. That doesn't happen for me all that often with PMLA.

Ping Pong Balls, Lemons, and Other Lethal Objects

[illustration: well at least someone thinks Eileen is funny]
by J J Cohen

Yesterday the Cohen family met Eileen, Anna K. and her daughter, and Eileen's sister's partner and their triple progeny at Comet Ping Pong. I love this pizza restaurant/bar/ping pong parlor because ... well, where else do you find all three of those together?

As the list of attendees demonstrates, many present were in the age range of 5-12 (and all present acted as if they belonged within this range).

I note the presence of innocent minors because I want to record here publicly that:

1. Eileen repeatedly used her ping pong ball as a deadly missile, several times aiming the projectile with great force against me
2. When the meal of pizza was over and many abandoned crusts littered the kiddies' plates, Eileen gathered these fire-singed pieces of bread, wrapped them in a napkin, and placed them in her purse. She announced to all that she keeps them for riding the subway. If a crowded train should yield no possibility of sitting (she told the children), she tosses a crust into the middle of the aisle. As everyone scrambles to grab the thing, she quietly takes an empty seat.
3. Claiming she got the idea from a New Yorker cartoon, Eileen initiated a game in which we tried to name more than 100 ways to kill a person with a lemon. Favorites: bouncing the lemon off someone's head repeatedly; stuffing the seeds into all airholes to trigger suffocation; squeezing the juice into someone's eyes to blind them, removing and drying out the rind, and then stabbing that blind person a week later when the rind has hardened enough to use as a shank.

I blog all of these facts because when the day arrives when one of the children in attendance is arrested for murdering a stranger using a citrus fruit, or for putting an eye out with an errant ping pong ball, or for causing a riot on the DC Metro by strewing stale pizza remnants, I want the world to know who is to blame.

Peter Travis, Disseminal Chaucer

by J J Cohen

Isn't that a great cover?

I was asked to blurb Peter Travis's new book, coming out in November from the University of Notre Dame Press. I did so happily, and was thereby able to peruse an advance copy. ITM readers will want to purchase the volume when it appears: it is readable, rigorous, and entertaining.

Some version of this praise from me will appear on its back cover:

Peter Travis opens the Pandora's box that is Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale" by asking a disarmingly simple question about its genre. He proceeds to detail, brilliantly, the narrative's status as a multiplex parody, a medieval Ulysses. By refusing to reduce the tale to a singular meaning, and by maintaining that its proliferative ardors are part of its formal structure, Travis provides a tour de force analysis not only of the work, but of Chaucer's ambitions throughout the Canterbury Tales. Lucid, engaging, and great fun to read, Dissemimal Chaucer provides a compelling model for doing theory-savvy work that is scrupulously attentive to medieval textuality.

And here is the official press copy, from the UND website:

Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is one of the most popular of The Canterbury Tales. It is only 646 lines long, yet it contains elements of a beast fable, an exemplum, a satire, and other genres. There have been countless attempts to articulate the “real” meaning of the tale, but it has confounded the critics. Peter Travis contends that part of the fun and part of the frustration of trying to interpret the tale has to do with Chaucer’s use of the tale to demonstrate the resistance of all literature to traditional critical practices. But the world of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is so creative and so quintessentially Chaucerian that critics persist in writing about it.

No one has followed the critical fortunes of Chauntecleer and his companions more closely over time than Peter Travis. One of the most important contributions of this book is his assessment of the tale’s reception. Travis also provides an admirable discussion of genre: his analysis of parody and Menippean satire clarify how to approach works such as this tale that take pleasure in resisting traditional generic classifications. Travis also demonstrates that the tale deliberately invoked its readers’ memories of specific grammar school literary assignments, and the tale thus becomes a miniaturized synopticon of western learning. Building on these analyses and insights, Travis’s final argument is that The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is Chaucer’s premier work of self-parody, an ironic apologia pro sua arte. The most profound matters foregrounded in the tale are not advertisements of the poet’s achievements. Rather, they are poetic problems that Chaucer wrestled with from the beginning of his career and, at the end of that career, wanted to address in a concentrated, experimental, and parapoetic way.

PETER W. TRAVIS is Henry Winkley Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Language and Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of many influential articles and Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle.

ADVANCE PRAISE: “ Disseminal Chaucer is an original work of criticism that breaks new ground in its treatment of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale in its approach to the tale and in its perspective on Chaucer’s poetry as a whole. It is very historicist based, which places it in the mainstream of current medieval practices, but its background material and authoritative reading will make it fresh and current for a very long time.” — Larry Scanlon, Rutgers University

De lapidibus: Medievalizing Addendum

[illustration: Marbode of Rennes (1035-1123), De lapidibus. This is a thirteenth century ms in the Countway Library at Harvard. Marbode was the principal gateway through which stone lore passed into the Middle Ages]

by J J Cohen

A contextualizing word about what I am attempting with this piece on stones.

I chose stone -- or stone chose me -- because rocks seem as inhuman a substance as can be found. Given the theme of the inaugural issue of postmedieval, why not explore the inter-relation of human and stone? Unlike in previous work, though, where I foregrounded the aesthetic impulse in the geologic, or the communicative potentialities of the lithic, or the phenomenology of stone architectures, here I want to get at the ways in which stone's movements might constitute an agency or even a desire that might challenge an anthropocentric vision of temporality and history ... that might invite meditation on what it means to be human, to inhabit a world that is potentially indifferent to humanity and yet intimately continuous with it at the same time.

By foregrounding mineralogical motility, I am trying to be both scientific (from a geological perspective all stone moves and changes; given a large enough temporal frame, any component of the universe acts as if an errant atom, any solid or sedentary combination proving ephemeral) and medieval.

Parts of the Large Project have appeared here at ITM and in print with names like "The Weight of the Past" and "Medieval Prehistory." The bigger investigation concerns not just stony architectures like Avebury, not just the possibility of human communication across vast temporal spans enabled by rock, but the substantiality of stone itself, its thingness, materiality, factuality. I have therefore been doing quite a bit of reading about how stone figures in medieval travel narratives, as well as in how stone's virtues and agency are envisioned in medieval geological treatises, the lapidaries. Stone in both genres never remains still.

Lapidaries stress the radiative virtue of gems. Vermidor, for example, holds such intensity that it glows at night like an inextinguishable candle. When placed against a bodily swelling, the ailment subsides immediately. Stones in these treatises are seldom found in some purely natural state. They are always being extracted from the bodies of exotic fish, or from the beaks of Indian birds oblivious to their powers. Stones, that is, are embedded within networks of agency in which what they can and cannot do -- where they may and may not move, what they desire and what they can achieve -- is simultaneously constrained and enabled by other actors within that network: humans, rivers, angels, animals, intensities of heat or light. No single component of the network is really detachable as a lonely actor. The whole meshwork pulses with movement because of the reaction chains that it enables, augments, and is often transformed by (autocatalysis without end, leading in unpredetermined directions).

Sorige, for example, is a green stone found within a river traversing the terrestrial paradise. Sometimes the currents of the stream convey sorige into la grant Ynde, conveying the gem from Eden to more mundane waterways, where it washes into the mountains. Fish-eating beasts as large as dogs place the stones in their mouths, unaware of its powers. Sorige can be extracted only when a naked virgin is placed close enough for these creatures to smell. A beast will approach the girl, place its head between her breasts, and fall asleep, intoxicated by the sweet scent of virginity. The beast can then be easily killed by a man waiting nearby, the stones extracted from its mouth. As long as the bearer is Christian, sorige will cure gout, destroy vermin, prevent stomach aches, and ward against rabid animals. The gem's powers will cease immediately if worn by someone dishonest or dirty.

No medieval stone exists alone, but is an agent in a narrative that exceeds any use value, any practicality, a gem of aesthetic efflorescence that conveys conventional histories and received traditions beyond any border that they would ordininarily cross. Lapidaries were a major gateway for pagan learning back into orthodox Christianity. They carried into the medieval future the challenges and spurs to the imagination of its superseded past. Lapidary lore could spur a reconceptualization of present and future in terms rather different from idées reçues. Sometimes this reconfigured reality bordered upon what we would today call the posthuman.

Few objects are as heterodox, vagrant, or powerful as medieval stones ... or maybe as all things lapidary, even today.

Stories of Stone

by J J Cohen

So I'm working on a piece for the inaugural issue of this little journal. Having spent a year and more composing a careful argument about Jewish-Christian neighboring in the English Middle Ages -- a project that is in some ways heavily reliant upon theory and philosophy, but that keeps much of this frame in the background, and so seems a little old fashioned (though I love it for that) -- anyway, being a little weary of the scholarly voice that I use, for example, when I write a Speculum essay, I am trying something different in this piece, a more experimental mode. Not that such experiments in voice are exactly new in my work, but this one so far takes it farther. The first issue of Postmedieval is devoted to the post-human, and that topic seems to me not well addressed without playing somewhat with the most fundamentally human of our tools, language.

Maybe I go too far? I am worried about sounding arch or stilted rather than engaging and creative. The worst result would be to render the piece unreadable or uninviting. Let me know what you think: this is how the essay begins.

----------------------

Stories of Stone

What could be less human than cold, impervious stone?

What could be less geologic than itinerant, adaptive humanity?

Geochoreography I
Rock solid. Stone faced. Bedrock. Written in stone. Stony silence. Stone cold. Cornerstone. Stone hearted.

The cultural truth of the mineralogical: nothing could be less expressive, less unyielding and unchanging, less taciturn or unfeeling, less fundamental than stone. Stone gives terra its firmness, mundane reality its comforting solidity. Stone is immobile. At those rare times when it slides or shakes or melts, what surprises us most is that something so inert can for a moment become kinetic. This movement is always brief, always the forgettable exception. Houses rise swiftly after an earthquake’s leveling, grass and trees effloresce after the lava flow expands the contours of an island, landslides bury troves that bulldozers can with exertion retrieve. Stone’s movements are its aberrations, not its nature.

Or so it seems to us, we whose lives are so short that were the stone we walk and build upon sentient, our presence would register nothing, we mayflies who live and perish in less than a blink. Small things who think our ephemeral walking and building expansive, who measure the world as if it were likewise swift and small. Small things who dwell in a large and rocky world. If stone could speak, what would it say about us?

Stone would call you transient, sporadic. The mayflies analogy was bruising to you, but apt. Stone was here from near the beginning, from the time when the restless gases of the earth decided they did not want to spend their days in swirling chaos, in couplings without lengthy comminglings, and settled into solid forms. Dolomite knows that story. Early organic things clung to stone’s solidity. It is harder than you suppose to tell the difference between nanobacteria and late animals, between starfish and human forms. They adhere, they multiply, they move. Yes, humans have always loved the permanence of stone, beholding in its endurance a thing they wish for in themselves. They scratch a small hole and bury their dead, they place rocks upon the bodies as if to keep the spinning world still. Organic life can hold perdurability only if the bacterial and the mammalian are one: then stone can see you. And it is from this vantage, this vantage so anthropodiscentered that language almost fails its imagining, it is from this lapidary point of view that stone can be seen to possess a life of its own.

A protean substance that retains no form in permanence, stone moves. Stone creates: architectures, novelities, art. Lava is the truth of stone, not a rocky aberration. All stone is in motion. Yet the humming bird pulse of human time is too rapid for geologic mobility to be seen. You expect stone to be heavy, but stone is light. If stone had a voice it would be less ponderous than your own. If you lived more slowly, if your hurried heartbeat did not limit the rhythm of your discerning, did not bind you to your swift smallness, you would know that you and stone are both human, or both stone.

The Future of the Canterbury Tales

by KARL STEEL

The future of the Canterbury Tales is the general prologue recited by a robot furry with a spastic condition.

For Your Summer Reading List: J. Allan Mitchell, Ethics and Eventfulness

by J J Cohen

Today I received via email a TMR installment reviewing Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones' edited collection Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales. I'm a fan of the book (I was one of the press readers, and then I blurbed it). The last line of Robin Chapman Stacey's very positive review struck me:

The New Middle Ages series edited by Bonnie Wheeler has produced some of the most innovative and exciting publications on medieval topics out there on the market today; this volume is a worthy addition to the list.

More evidence on the "innovative and exciting" and front: J. Allan Mitchell's Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature. I tried to secure a copy at Kalamazoo this year, but was beaten to the last copy. Professor Mitchell was kind enough to send me an autographed copy, and I am just about to lose myself in reading it. Here is the press advertising copy:

Medieval writers were fascinated by fortune and misfortune, yet the critical problems raised by such explorations have not been adequately theorized. Allan Mitchell invites us to consider these contingencies in relation to an “ethics of the event.” His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself—locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life. While earlier scholarship has detailed the iconography of Lady Fortune, this book alters and advances the conversation so that we see fortune less as a negative exemplum than as a positive sign of radical phenomena.

Mitchell is well read in medieval literature, philosophy, and theory (especially Deleuze and Derrida, from a quick skim). Put it on your reading list as well. We still have two or three weeks til classes begin.

Le Juif Inconnu

[my images; click to enlarge]
by J J Cohen

A slow walk across the Pont de la Tournelle, boats full of tourists gliding with colors below. A pause on l'Ile Saint-Louis for ice cream: deep red of cassis, burnt caramel almond, flecked white of true vanilla, deepest chocolate for ardent Katherine. The morning was too early for such indulgence. The man at the café who placed red and brown and white on cones rebuked us with his silence, but we didn't care. We ate our treat and passed along the Pont Marie, stranded sand of the Paris plages beneath, onward to the Marais.

The Mémorial de la Shoah, the sad business of the day. We'd decided back in Washington that we would visit the Mémorial du Martyr Juif Inconnu during our Paris peregrinations. Now that we were approaching the site we were hesitating with our lingering on bridges and our morning ice cream. A monument to six million dead. The courtyard is lined with walls in which are cut the names of those deported from Paris. Eleven thousand of these names belong to children.

We hesitated to enter that courtyard. A bullet proof wall, translucent but still brutal, separated us from the memorial. We could see the cylinder with the camps emblazoned. STRUTHOF. AUSCHWITZ. MAJDANEK. We could see the steep walls with their names we did not want to read. We knew already how familiar some would be: Cohen, Alpert, Weitzman, Farber, Laufer. A brief litany of shared ancestry. Not our family, not our family ... and yet familiar names, intimate strangers. Dead for bearing our names. Why would we bring our children to such a place? Would they be able to measure the loss? Would they imagine themselves as wall-carved names?

We almost turned back. The guard saw us loitering and buzzed the door unlocked. He looked through our camera bag, our backpack. He smiled at the chocolate cookies for Katherine, the stuffed dog she carries as comfort. Then we were inside. Cohen, Alpert, Weitzman, Farber, Laufer. Easy to read, under every year of the war. Eleven thousand of those deported were children. I looked at Alex and Katherine. A veteran of the Holocaust Museum in DC, the tears were already in Alex's eyes. Katherine, though, was smiling. She liked the flowers that someone had left, the small piles of memorial pebbles, the burned out yahrzeit, the little Russian doll crumbled in a corner.

We looked at the cylinder with its encircling camps. We looked at the mounted plaques with their stone images of despair. We entered the main building. What you are about to see is quite intense, the woman warned us in French and then again -- for emphasis -- in English. I'll watch your daughter for you if you like. Should we? I looked at Alex, and he looked down at the floor. Wendy spoke for him: No.

We left. In the courtyard, by the cylinder with all those camps, by the names and the doll and the ruined candle, Katherine began to spin. As we lost ourselves to history, she lost herself in whirling, faster, and faster. She laughed at a private joke, the sobriety of the place was lost to her. I took my camera from its bag and grabbed images of everything, as if this were the last day we could have here: the memorial, the plaques, the building, the names, the girl lost in a dance of her own devising. We left, at last.

Later that evening I said my good night to Alex. He called me back to him as I closed his door. He gave me the Serious Look. "I'm sorry," he said,"for today. I'm sorry for the opportunity I made us miss. We didn't go to the exhibit because of me."

My heart makes a sound that I cannot replicate when the sadness of my children breaks it. I could feel the fissure begin. "No." I said that word as firmly as I could. I was not going to allow him that sadness, that regret. Katherine taught me something and I needed to speak it. "That's not what happened at all." Instead of spending much time at the Mémorial de la Shoah, we had crossed the Marais to see the Musée d'art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, where we'd witnessed some sad things (the shattered remains of medieval Jewish tombstones, whole lives readable from the fragments of Hebrew inscribed in their ruins). But we spent most of our time with a series of small posters spread throughout the museum, each of which bore a picture of a person now living and a paragraph or two in his or her own words about what it means to be a Jew. For many, Jewishness meant nothing: it was more important to be French, or expat Algerian, or a hybrid of cultures, or to hold a fragmented identity. For others Jewishness was all, an anchor in a tumult. For every person, though, Jewishness meant something very different. No eternal verities, only lived complexities. Accommodation to a difficult world. Reinvention. Sometimes rejection. Much history. But always life. Alex's fascination with these plaques is what brought us through the entirety of the museum's collection. No opportunity had been lost, I asured him. The Shoah is not going anywhere, even if Jewishness -- even if humanness itself -- is always on the move.

Leeds 2010 CFP: Jewish travel and exploration

by J J Cohen
Posted on behalf of Eva Frojmovic.

'Travel and Exploration'
Call for Papers/Sessions - International Medieval Congress 2010 (Leeds 12-15 July 2010)

Migration has been part of the Israelite myth since biblical times. During the medieval period, migration, expulsion, and travel were part of the Jewish experience and the Jewish imaginary. Whether one thinks of the legal aspects of travelling; or of famous travellers such as Benjamin of Tudela and Petachia of Regensburg; whether one thinks of the astronomers and mapmakers such as Abraham Zacuto or the cartographers of Mallorca; whether one thinks of the travellers' tales deposited in the Genizah, or of forced displacement, the subject of migration, travel and exploration is a perfect opportunity for Jewish studies scholars and students of Jewish Christian and Jewish Muslim relations to engage in scholarly dialogue and debate. We are now seeking proposals for sessions (3 papers or multiples of 3) or individual papers relating to Jewish travel and exploration in the Medieval period. The IMC's own CFP, forms for paper and session proposals are available here.

Deadlines: 31 Aug 09 for individual paper proposals, 31 Sep 09 for session proposals. Enquiries about the Jewish Studies strand can be made in the first instance to Dr Eva Frojmovic, Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Leeds, e.frojmovic@leeds.ac.uk

Dame Eleanor Hull

by J J Cohen

I've enjoyed reading the blog Dame Eleanor Hull for quite some time. Its author's recent burst of blogging energy has resulted in some excellent posts that most ITM readers will enjoy as well:

• How we become (on the choices we do and do not make, and the imprint they have upon our personal and professional lives)
• Recovering perfectionist (about publishing, rigor, ridicule, clarity, provisionality, achievement)
• Lessons for girls: writing the script (about networking and self-presentation)

Quick and Dirty Reviews: Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism

by KARL STEEL

I honestly can't remember who recommended Adriana Cavarero's Horrorism to me, so, whoever or whatever you are, thanks for enriching my understanding of violence as I slog my way towards finishing my book. Review is below the fold.

"Today it is particularly senseless that the meaning of war and its horror--as well, obviously, as its terror--should still be entrusted to the perspective of the warrior....The civilian victims, of whom the numbers of dead have soared from the Second World War on, do not share the desire to kill, much less the desire to get killed" (65).

"the instant of time that blows the bodies of the 'human bombs' and their victims to pieces today annuls the dimension of time: time in which to face up to the reality of one's own crime and to answer for it singularly. Closed in on itself, suicidal horrorism thus takes pride in the unappealability of its work in the service of an instantaneous and irresponsible violence. In this sense, it is no surprise that books on female suicide bombings written by women who are disposed to understand them, if not justify and sympathize with them, have a tendency to minimize the ethical responsibility of the bombers" (103)

I think other people are likely to to get a lot more out of this book than I did. Adriana Cavarero rightly demands that we should try to apprehend violence from the perspective not of the warrior (or 'terrorist') but from that of the victim. The victim, we should presume, does not care about whether or not he or she is being mutilated, tortured, or killed by a state actor, a criminal, or suicide bomber. Nor does the victim care about the motivation of the agent of violence: here she might have used one of Zizek's favorite quotes, this from Deleuze: "si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l'autre, vous êtes foutu!", since these dreams of the other, dreams whether for 'freedom and democracy' or for the Caliphate or whatever, do not matter to the victim. What matters is the pain and death, especially when the victim, caught unawares, has been unable to defend him or herself from the violence. This latter point, too, is key to Cavarero, as she observes that what distinguishes modern warfare from Homeric violence (her paradigm) is the particular suffering of the defenseless. Not the battlefield, but the bombed out city, or marketplace, or supermarket, or the theater filled with corpses and poison gas, is the picture of modern mass violence. For those interested in a richer philosophy and politics of war, for those interested in engaging in further debates with Bataille (she's against him), Arendt (largely for), suicide bombing (particularly when committed by women), and contemporary modes of violence, I imagine this book is indispensable. But it absolutely needs to be paired with Zizek's Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, in large part because Cavarero never considers the systemic violence of global capitalism itself. To use Zizek's terminology, she is so committed to studying subjective violence that--symptomatically--she does not see the system of violence that sustains her own way of life.

We might save Cavarero's analysis by imagining what a 'horroristic' study might make of the fancy widget-maker (fwm): does the fwm care whether or not she is making a fw for the international yuppie smart set? Would it be all the same to her if she were manufacturing, say, toilet plungers? I suspect so. Cavarero demands that warriors and terrorists alike try to understand the violence they commit from the perspective of the victim. What might happen to our (where our= "the international yuppie smart set") love of our fw when we try to apprehend it from the perspective of the worker? Alternately, in my own work, I could demand that we try to understand nonhuman death from the perspective of the nonhuman. What does the cow care whether its meat is properly cooked? What does the sheep care whether its skin will be used for Chaucer or, god help it, Lydgate? Cavarero could ask such questions, but she is relentlessly and unthinkingly anthropocentric, a stance that is becoming increasingly unforgivable for any critical theorist, given the growing body of critical animal theory. However, when she writes, "Horror has to do precisely with the killing of uniqueness....it consists in an attack on the ontological material that, transforming unique beings into a mass of superfluous beings whose 'murder is as impersonal as the squashing of a gnat' [qting Arendt Origins of Totalitarianism:], also takes away from them their own death" (43), this surely applies as much to animals, medieval or modern, as it does to the human animal caught up in some totalitarian fantasy.

I have to confess to a perhaps petty annoyance with her typical litany of historical horrors: Stalinist Ukraine, Maoist China, Palestine and Israel, Iraq, Guernica, the Khmer Rouge, Chechnya, Rwanda, German and Japanese firebombed (& otherwise) cities, Nanking, the Holocaust, Armenia (with a few scattered references to Italian cases). There's no evidence that she considered why this representative litany occurred to her and not, say, the Congo of King Leopold or the DR Congo of the twenty-first century: my sense is that consideration of these other African killing fields would require an analysis of her own complicity as a citizen of a wealthy European nation. I suffer an even pettier annoyance when she writes: "Any review of the refined arts of war developed over the course of the century would have to dedicate a separate chapter to the aerial bombardments inaugurated by German forces over Guernica and Coventry" (51). Why not Italian forces over Ethiopia the year before Guernica, or, arguably, RAF forces over Sulaymaniyah? (and while it's tempting to suggest the Zeppelin raids of English, beginning in 1915, the difference between these and Sulaymaniyah, Ethiopia, or Guernica is that the English could defend themselves: the Kurds, Ethiopians, and Basques could not, and thus stand as better representatives of horrorism (unlike the inhabitants of Coventry)). And perhaps pettiest of all: her moments of sloppiness, e.g., "...in this massacre there are not even innocents anymore, given that, whoever they are, each one is as good as the next in the abstract role of example. Although called infidel or miscreant, the absolute enemy loses all quality and assumes the role of anyone at all, with respect to whom the eventual faith of every singular victim--who sometimes, and certainly in modern Iraq, believes in the same god as his murderers--is just an accident" (75). Good point on the purposeful randomness of the victims of modern mass violence, but, c'mon, this not only elides the religious differences between Sunni and Shia, it also elides the fact that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship the same God! Sheesh. Just like Catholics and Protestants, who have gotten along, as we know, famously well.

Delirious Melons, and Other Ancient Snark

by KARL STEEL

In this several months-long absence, I've been plugging away at my book manuscript in hopes of an October submission. I'm ahead of schedule, but getting to that point meant much else that is important to me fell away, even as I frenzied myself in what I would have otherwise left alone.

To get back in the game, I'll share over the next week or so some of the amusing bits I've run across while, uh, plugging. Here's one: Irenaeus of Lyons' parody of the specialized terminology of Gnostic cosmology in his Against Heresies I.11.4

There exists a certain royal Pre-principle, pre-unintelligible, pre-insubstantial and pre-prerotund, which I call Gourd. With this Goard there coexists a Power which I call Supervacuity. This Gourd and this Supervacuity, being one, emitted without emitting a Fruit visible in all its parts, edible and sweet, which language calls Cucumber. With this Cucumber there is a Power of the same substance, which I call Melon. These Powers, Gourd and Supervacuity, and Cucumber and Melon, emitted the whole multitude of Valentinus' delirious Melons. For if one must accomodate ordinary language to the first Tetrad and if each one chooses the terms he wants, who would keep him from using these last terms, much more worthy of credence, in ordinary usage, and known by all?

I could tolerate nonacademic complaints about academic jargon much better if they were all packaged like this!

Like all of you, I hope, I'm a fan of ancient snark, although perhaps I ought not to be: it's probably immoral for me, for example, to admire the snark of an anti-Catharist, if only for what the Cathars (or so-called Cathars?) suffered. I offer this to you (again, as I did in Sept 2006), then, in the hopes of inviting attacks from your good consciences: from Eckbert of Schönau's (yes, they were related) Sermon 6, "Contra secundam haeresim de esu carnium," of his Sermones contra Catharos:

Miror si Dominus creator omnium rerum, quando hominibus concessit ut ederent carnes, ignorabat hanc vestram sanctam rationem, videlicet immundos fieri omnes qui ederent carnes, pro eo quod omnis caro ex concubitu nasceretur. Heu! quod non habebat catharum unum, qui ei hanc sapientiam in aurem susurrasset, in illa hora quando dedit potestatem edendi carnes Noe et filiis ejus! (PL 195:37A)

It is quite extraordinary that when the Lord, the creator of all things, allowed men to eat flesh, he ignored your "sacred reason," namely that because all meat is born from coitus, everyone who eats meat becomes unclean. Alas! that he didn’t have any Cathar about who could have whispered this wisdom to him in his ear in that hour when he gave Noah and his sons the power to eat flesh!

Image via

http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Safe travels to the Cohens!

Homeward Bound

[illustration: many things are better in Paris, but at least one thing is worse: the clowns are frightening. Always frightening. Here is one at the Paris Plages, the stretch of the Seine that has been transformed into a summer beach]

by J J Cohen

All good things ...

After a month abroad I return to the US tomorrow. Each segment of the journey went well: I was happy with my Leeds keynote and the conference itself; Italy (or the small portion I saw of it) was fantastic; and Paris has been ... well, Paris. Not an eternal city, but -- from the vantage point of our apartment here on the rue Claude Bernard -- a city of everyday lives, of easygoing camaraderie as well as people happy in their solitude. The café has allowed Parisians to perfect the art of beings at ease with oneself. I will miss it here.

Au revoir, et à bientôt.