A spirited reading of Derrida's view of ethics as transcendental and performative.In Jacques Derrida's Ghost, David Appelbaum explores three of Derrida's favorite themes: the other, death, and the work of mourning. He shows how Derrida's unique philosophy, mindful of ghosts, proposes a respectful attitude toward otherness-whether the "other" be corporeal or indeed phantom. Taking up Derrida's concern with performative ethics, Appelbaum examines the possibility of such an ethics of subjectivity within the context of performance.
A creative study of Maurice Blanchot's theory of literary voice.In His Voice considers the idea of the neuter in Maurice Blanchot's work, and seeks to work out through an exercise of literary impersonation, or ventriloquism, how and why Blanchot relied on this form. Neither active nor passive, the neuter expresses a kind of third voice beyond the command of the author, one that speaks paradoxically of what lies outside of speaking but nonetheless exerts an irrepressible influence on thought. The neuter is exilic, messianic, and fragmentary. Since it cannot be directly accounted for, Blanchot uses a number of indirect approaches-notably, myth-to announce the key elements of his view. Orpheus, Odysseus, and principally Narcissus figure his conception and elaborate the operation of giving voice. Through a distillation of Blanchot's narrative and critical texts-focusing on the late works, The Step Not Beyond, and The Writing of the Disaster-and through an emphasis on performance, In His Voice enacts the event of writing in search of how author's inscriptive reality appears in the world.
A creative study of Maurice Blanchot's theory of literary voice.In His Voice considers the idea of the neuter in Maurice Blanchot's work, and seeks to work out through an exercise of literary impersonation, or ventriloquism, how and why Blanchot relied on this form. Neither active nor passive, the neuter expresses a kind of third voice beyond the command of the author, one that speaks paradoxically of what lies outside of speaking but nonetheless exerts an irrepressible influence on thought. The neuter is exilic, messianic, and fragmentary. Since it cannot be directly accounted for, Blanchot uses a number of indirect approaches-notably, myth-to announce the key elements of his view. Orpheus, Odysseus, and principally Narcissus figure his conception and elaborate the operation of giving voice. Through a distillation of Blanchot's narrative and critical texts-focusing on the late works, The Step Not Beyond, and The Writing of the Disaster-and through an emphasis on performance, In His Voice enacts the event of writing in search of how author's inscriptive reality appears in the world.
Portuguese Sailor Boy is a fragmentary history of the bloodline of the Portuguese explorer, Vasco de Gamma. The bloodline motif plays out in a series of scenes of an unnamed contemporary relation—in symbolic forms like nautical maps and paint-by-numbers frigates. The narrative centers on the wayfaring of his character, which reveals a life of accidental achievement as well as unadvertised follies, and neither ascends nor descends to an end.
This is a book of poems to remember those for whom 'time had lapsed.' The poems begin innocently with common collections, rocks or coins, and progressively, become memories that gather the death in the folds of language, to commemorate the passage. The words are most forceful for those closest to the heart of the narrator. The poems mourn a secret bond with each lost one. In the work of grief, special harmonies in poetry open the soul to the transcendent joy of simply being.
A glass eye reflects without seeing.The Glass Eye is a book-length poem that binds ecstatic utterances in its narrative with worldly dramas of a life. Beginning in a long moment of descent, it is a story of deaths and resurrections, resignation and hope, brutal, luminous, foreseeing.The Glass Eye makes a large statement. The narrator alternates between stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate. The work stretches to encompass the central paradox of the human condition, a perspective that juxtaposes the deepest human wish against the vast forces that shape and thwart it.
All poems included in the poetry collection reveal the plain, matter-of-fact style devoid of everything suggestive of artifice. These poems have completely got rid of the conventional, artificial phraseology. There is no doubt that the poet very aptly traverses an immense range of emotion and experience. Here we find the poet's passion and powerful imagination in rich abundance.
There is no doubt that all poems included in the poetry collection make it evident that the poet is a very impressive artist. These poems reveal remarkable skill and simplicity of style. Here we find a graceful and harmonious movement of language. The spontaneous and profound emotions are nowhere more exquisitelyrevealed than in these poems which are, in many respects, quite unique.
Drawing on clues from Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Jacobson, Condillac, and Diderot, Appelbaum investigates the vocalized, acoustical aspect of audible expression. He analyzes the tendency to equate voice with speaking, and speaking with writing, the result being that vocalizing is equivalent to thinking aloud. Appelbaum affirms the body's role in vocalizing expression by proposing a new and radical interpretation of the truth of voice: that it is true if it provides a disclosure of our human contradictions. Sound, or the acoustical properties of a person's voice, is able to bring about the revolutionary new set of conditions which reveal the truth of one's condition. The author provides a unique account of the subjugation of voice by thought, indicating means for reversing the authority of the sound and for freeing up the voice. He concludes with the argument that poetic voice reconciles the search for semantic meaning with the raw, acoustical effect that the free voice causes.
