新思想拒绝文化属性:一个文学的教训

从文学角度讨论文化的基本品质:过时、狭隘、准自然的非理性.1.按照译学中"可译性"的观念,愈是深深"植根于所属文化"的文本,愈不具备可译性;由于翻译实为不同文化间的交流,所以深刻体现文化属性的文本(亦即思想)不具备充分的可交流性.文化属性是交流的障碍.2.文化是"以往年代或时代的思想",从而以表达新思想为宗旨的新文学顽强地拒绝文化属性.3.由于自动免除了文化的约束,新思想具备充分的可译、可交流性.结论:清醒地对待文化,而不是一味热衷于文化,是文化论者的职守,也是一个崇尚进步和创新的社会的明智之举.     

Agamben and the poetics of indifference

Abstract

Agamben’s overall method as detailed in The Signature of All Things is named by him as philosophical archaeology. Said archaeology addresses the large-scale concepts that organise discursive structures over time and place and reveals their common metaphysical basis. In particular an impossible to sustain economy between a founding common and a founded proper which constantly change place so that the clear distinction between that which founds and that which is founded becomes impossible to discern. It becomes, in his terminology, indifferent. The signatures of Power, Life, Potentiality and Language are well known in Agamben’s work, as is his love for poetry. What has not yet been commented on is that for Agamben Poetry is a signature and so must be subject to the same method of suspensive indifference as the more nefarious discourses of power and domination. In this article the signature of Poetry is defined as the economy between the semantic, or prose as founding common, and the semiotic, or poetry as founded proper. That Agamben gives so much attention to the signature Poetry is because it is central to the suspension of the basis of all signatory constructs, Language as pure communicability as such. Yet more than this Agamben’s indifferentiation of poetry in terms of the perceived tension between semantic and semiotic, opens up complex and powerful forces at the heart of the poetic.     

(Re)circulating Foreign Bodies

This paper situates Richard Fung's auto-ethnographic video Sea in the Blood within the context of the personal illness narrative as a mode of political resistance which emerged alongside the movements of feminist health activism and global HIV/AIDS activism. I argue that as a critical illness narrative, which reads the experiences of transnational travel and migration in and through a narrative of illness, race, and sexuality, Sea in the Blood disrupts the genres of both the personal illness narrative and the imperial travel narrative while resisting the assimilative pull of what Charles L. Briggs calls the “political economy of communicability.” Specifically, I argue that Fung resists cultural and political absorption using three primary strategies: the symbolics of blood, the juxtaposition of illness and travel narratives, and the tactics of misalignment, or the self-conscious use of contradictory narratives and competing modes of representation. Through these strategies, Sea in the Blood is installed as a form of revolutionary activism which comments on the historical pathologization of foreign bodies, and exposes the ways in which the medicalization of race underwrites the medicalized history of sexuality. Accordingly, Sea in the Blood inaugurates what might be thought of as a politics of incommunicability through the sensuous and metaphorical re/circulation of foreign bodies.