Undergraduate studies at the University of Athens (B.A. in English Language and Literature, 1987), graduate studies at the University of Lancaster (M.A. 1988, Ph.D. 1993 specializing in Contemporary British Literature). I have attended the international summer programs at the School of Criticism and Theory (Cornell University, 1997) and at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum (Perugia, 1998). I have taught at the University of Lancaster (1991-1993) and the Metropolitan University of Manchester (1992-1993). Since 1993 I have been teaching at the University of Cyprus. I have held Visiting Research Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh, Sept. 1999-March 2000) and at the Center for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (University of Leeds, February-July 2004).
Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2023
This essay proposes to critically engage with dominant materialist and narrative models of human ... more This essay proposes to critically engage with dominant materialist and narrative models of human identity, addressing the old, 'tired' question of subjectivity from a twenty-first century perspective. Drawing on contemporary neuroscientific theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I aim to read Charles Fernyhough's A Box of Birds (2012) as a creative reflection on the nature of memory, consciousness and the unconscious. As I shall demonstrate, what lies at the heart of Fernyhough's reflection is the Platonic allegory of the mind as an aviary. Taken up and re-interpreted by different characters in the novel, this allegory permits Fernyhough to experiment with contemporary discourses of neuro-subjectivity, tracing a richer, more dynamic relation among mind, brain and body.
The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora by reinscribing it ... more The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora by reinscribing it as an intervention in the context of two important postmodern debates. The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of “the beginning before the Beginning.” The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between incommensurable entities: the “demonic” and the social, desire and the Law, material production and representation. 1 contend: (I) that the introduction of the chora in RPL is part of Kristeva’s effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato’s Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva’s part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our transcendence to the “demonic” lies less “beyond us” than “in-between.”
This essay constitutes an attempt to situate Kristeva within the long dialectical tradition (from... more This essay constitutes an attempt to situate Kristeva within the long dialectical tradition (from Hegel to Sartre) that not only opposes thought to any form of dualism but, more importantly, has systematically defined the event of thinking in terms of the "historical, loveful violence" that characterizes any mediating process (Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle 241). Comparing her approach to language and being with those of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, my aim is to argue that thought in Kristeva is the life-enhancing encounter between the pathos of the negative (qua revolt, questioning, irony, critique, displacement, destabilization) and the ethos of sublimation (understood as the "patience" of knowing, the infinity of meaning, "the dignity of Beauty"[Kristeva, Intimate Revolt 251 and Sense and NonSense 7]). As I shall demonstrate, it is through this encounter that a passage, an enabling economy of relations, can open up between the suffering of the immanent (flesh or bare life), the transcendence of every singular "I," and the community held together by the sharing of the sign. Résumé: Cet essai tente de situer Kristeva dans la longue tradition dialectique (de Hegel à Sartre) qui non seulement oppose la pensée à toute forme de dualisme mais, de façon plus importante, définit systématiquement l'acte de penser en relation avec la "violence historique, aimante" qui caractérise tout processus de mediation (Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle 241). En comparant son approche du langage et de l'être avec celles de Jacques Derrida et de Giorgio Agamben, mon objectif est d'arguer que la pensée chez Kristeva est l'expérience enrichissante d'une rencontre, d'un face-à face, entre le pathos du négatif (qua révolte, interrogation, ironie, critique, déplacement, déstabilisation) et l'ethos de sublimation (compris comme la "patience" du savoir, l'infini du sens, "la dignité de la Beauté" [Kristeva, Intimate Revolt 251 et Sense and NonSense 7]). Comme je le démontre, c'est à travers ce face-à-face qu'un passage, qu'une économie favorable de relations, peut s'ouvrir entre la souffrance de l'immanence (chair ou "vie nue"), la transcendance de tout "Je" singulier et la communauté liée par le partage du signe. Keywords: pathos of the negative-ethos of sublimation-thought-signifiance-experience-nobility of thought-Hegel-Derrida-Agamben-Desire in Language-Sense and NonSense Intimate Revolt-New Maladies of the Soul-La haine et le pardon
It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very m... more It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very much to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more appealing to them.-Nietzsche, The Gay Science What has been termed the cognitive turn in metaphorology (namely, the discovery of the cognitive value of metaphor since I. A. Richards' 1936 groundbreaking book on rhetoric) has brought about an explosion of interest in metaphor even in disciplines traditionally hostile to it (i.e. the natural and social sciences). This explosion has been accompanied by a broadening of the meaning of metaphor and an increasing interrogation of the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning. Since the 1960s this interrogation has taken the form of a move towards a more archaic motility before/beyond the age of classificatory logic responsible, according to Hans-Georg Gadamer, for the opposition between the figurative and the literal (qtd. in Cooper 259). In this essay I intend to engage with two contemporary thinkers whose writings on metaphor I consider exemplary of this move, namely, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. In the first part of the essay I want to follow the steps both theorists take away from metaphor as the classical rhetorical trope. My task in this part will be to throw into relief the difference that renders both Kristeva and Derrida's articulations of metaphor difficult. The difficulty lies, as I shall argue, in appreciating what I shall call the reversive force at work in every motion, a force suggested by the prefix dis-/dif-shared by both difference and difficulty. If misreading is the index of carelessness in the face of precisely such a reversive force, [1] then the felicity of our conveyance through footsteps destined to remain ahead of us necessitates a commitment to a care-full reading that (following Maurice Blanchot) will take the risk of imagining the hand writing and the death (i.e. the promise, chance, fear of impossibility) that bears this hand along. [2] Paradoxically, for Blanchot this difficult reading is marked by an ease that we associate with happiness and innocence, for it opens itself joyfully as well as trustingly to the death borne by writing and "holds [it] in its turn" though (as Blanchot emphasizes) only in order to reverse it (precisely "through its ease"): i.e. in order to render the scandal of impossibility the very site for the unfolding of life (Holland 316). It is this happy innocence, this joyful beginning as if for the first time (without guilt or knowledge, without fear of harm, without praejudicium) that will determine my understanding of politics in the second part of the essay. My concern in this context will be to investigate the stakes of each theorist's pas au-delà: that is, their step beyond in the direction of a more archaic motility. If metaphoricalness lies at the core of what for Kristeva is the key postmodern epistemological question (i.e. "what is mobility, what is innovation?" Tales of Love 275), then what are the chances opened for the subject-in-language-and-history by each theoretical formulation of an other metaphor? Kristeva, Derrida and the Classical Philosophical Concept of Metaphor In their treatment of metaphor, both Derrida and Kristeva make clear that their attempt to raise the question of metaphor anew should not be interpreted as a naïve privileging of the concept, as it has traditionally been defined in rhetoric and philosophy. Indeed, they consciously situate their metaphorologies post Heidegger's firm relegation of metaphor to the realm of metaphysics. Drawing on Heidegger's discussion, they argue that the dependence of the philosophical concept of metaphor on the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible renders it the master-category of metaphysics, its very possibility as a movement of idealization meta ta physika (i.e. outside/beyond natural phenomena). At the same time, they draw attention to the indebtedness of the classical philosophical understanding of metaphor (since Aristotle's first systematic treatment of it) to the concept of resemblance or analogy. As Derrida suggests, it is not an accident that Aristotle's discussion of metaphor forms part of his treatise on mimesis that opens the Poetics. Situated thus, metaphor, like poetry, is perceived as an effect of doubling-the doubling by renaming of truth, nature, the proper or the name as proper-and of resemblance-the act of erasing the difference of the double in recognizing it as analogous (i.e. other and yet the same). This is, in fact, according to Derrida, what inscribes metaphor within Aristotle's ontological chain, a chain that binds naming
by John Lechte and Maria Margaroni
Contents Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Maria Margaroni... more by John Lechte and Maria Margaroni
Contents Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Maria Margaroni and John Lechte
Chapter 1: The Semiotic Revolution: Lost Causes, Uncomfortable Remainders, Binding Futures Maria Margaroni T
Chapter 2: The Trial of the Third: Kristeva's Oedipus and the Crisis of Identification Maria Margaroni
Chapter 3: Love and Death by Any Other Name... (On Love and Melancholia) John Lechte
Chapter 4: Violence, Ethics and Transcendence: Kristeva and Levinas John Lechte
Chapter 5: The Imaginary and the Spectacle: Kristeva's View John Lechte
Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2023
This essay proposes to critically engage with dominant materialist and narrative models of human ... more This essay proposes to critically engage with dominant materialist and narrative models of human identity, addressing the old, 'tired' question of subjectivity from a twenty-first century perspective. Drawing on contemporary neuroscientific theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I aim to read Charles Fernyhough's A Box of Birds (2012) as a creative reflection on the nature of memory, consciousness and the unconscious. As I shall demonstrate, what lies at the heart of Fernyhough's reflection is the Platonic allegory of the mind as an aviary. Taken up and re-interpreted by different characters in the novel, this allegory permits Fernyhough to experiment with contemporary discourses of neuro-subjectivity, tracing a richer, more dynamic relation among mind, brain and body.
The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora by reinscribing it ... more The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora by reinscribing it as an intervention in the context of two important postmodern debates. The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of “the beginning before the Beginning.” The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between incommensurable entities: the “demonic” and the social, desire and the Law, material production and representation. 1 contend: (I) that the introduction of the chora in RPL is part of Kristeva’s effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato’s Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva’s part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our transcendence to the “demonic” lies less “beyond us” than “in-between.”
This essay constitutes an attempt to situate Kristeva within the long dialectical tradition (from... more This essay constitutes an attempt to situate Kristeva within the long dialectical tradition (from Hegel to Sartre) that not only opposes thought to any form of dualism but, more importantly, has systematically defined the event of thinking in terms of the "historical, loveful violence" that characterizes any mediating process (Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle 241). Comparing her approach to language and being with those of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, my aim is to argue that thought in Kristeva is the life-enhancing encounter between the pathos of the negative (qua revolt, questioning, irony, critique, displacement, destabilization) and the ethos of sublimation (understood as the "patience" of knowing, the infinity of meaning, "the dignity of Beauty"[Kristeva, Intimate Revolt 251 and Sense and NonSense 7]). As I shall demonstrate, it is through this encounter that a passage, an enabling economy of relations, can open up between the suffering of the immanent (flesh or bare life), the transcendence of every singular "I," and the community held together by the sharing of the sign. Résumé: Cet essai tente de situer Kristeva dans la longue tradition dialectique (de Hegel à Sartre) qui non seulement oppose la pensée à toute forme de dualisme mais, de façon plus importante, définit systématiquement l'acte de penser en relation avec la "violence historique, aimante" qui caractérise tout processus de mediation (Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle 241). En comparant son approche du langage et de l'être avec celles de Jacques Derrida et de Giorgio Agamben, mon objectif est d'arguer que la pensée chez Kristeva est l'expérience enrichissante d'une rencontre, d'un face-à face, entre le pathos du négatif (qua révolte, interrogation, ironie, critique, déplacement, déstabilisation) et l'ethos de sublimation (compris comme la "patience" du savoir, l'infini du sens, "la dignité de la Beauté" [Kristeva, Intimate Revolt 251 et Sense and NonSense 7]). Comme je le démontre, c'est à travers ce face-à-face qu'un passage, qu'une économie favorable de relations, peut s'ouvrir entre la souffrance de l'immanence (chair ou "vie nue"), la transcendance de tout "Je" singulier et la communauté liée par le partage du signe. Keywords: pathos of the negative-ethos of sublimation-thought-signifiance-experience-nobility of thought-Hegel-Derrida-Agamben-Desire in Language-Sense and NonSense Intimate Revolt-New Maladies of the Soul-La haine et le pardon
It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very m... more It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very much to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more appealing to them.-Nietzsche, The Gay Science What has been termed the cognitive turn in metaphorology (namely, the discovery of the cognitive value of metaphor since I. A. Richards' 1936 groundbreaking book on rhetoric) has brought about an explosion of interest in metaphor even in disciplines traditionally hostile to it (i.e. the natural and social sciences). This explosion has been accompanied by a broadening of the meaning of metaphor and an increasing interrogation of the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning. Since the 1960s this interrogation has taken the form of a move towards a more archaic motility before/beyond the age of classificatory logic responsible, according to Hans-Georg Gadamer, for the opposition between the figurative and the literal (qtd. in Cooper 259). In this essay I intend to engage with two contemporary thinkers whose writings on metaphor I consider exemplary of this move, namely, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. In the first part of the essay I want to follow the steps both theorists take away from metaphor as the classical rhetorical trope. My task in this part will be to throw into relief the difference that renders both Kristeva and Derrida's articulations of metaphor difficult. The difficulty lies, as I shall argue, in appreciating what I shall call the reversive force at work in every motion, a force suggested by the prefix dis-/dif-shared by both difference and difficulty. If misreading is the index of carelessness in the face of precisely such a reversive force, [1] then the felicity of our conveyance through footsteps destined to remain ahead of us necessitates a commitment to a care-full reading that (following Maurice Blanchot) will take the risk of imagining the hand writing and the death (i.e. the promise, chance, fear of impossibility) that bears this hand along. [2] Paradoxically, for Blanchot this difficult reading is marked by an ease that we associate with happiness and innocence, for it opens itself joyfully as well as trustingly to the death borne by writing and "holds [it] in its turn" though (as Blanchot emphasizes) only in order to reverse it (precisely "through its ease"): i.e. in order to render the scandal of impossibility the very site for the unfolding of life (Holland 316). It is this happy innocence, this joyful beginning as if for the first time (without guilt or knowledge, without fear of harm, without praejudicium) that will determine my understanding of politics in the second part of the essay. My concern in this context will be to investigate the stakes of each theorist's pas au-delà: that is, their step beyond in the direction of a more archaic motility. If metaphoricalness lies at the core of what for Kristeva is the key postmodern epistemological question (i.e. "what is mobility, what is innovation?" Tales of Love 275), then what are the chances opened for the subject-in-language-and-history by each theoretical formulation of an other metaphor? Kristeva, Derrida and the Classical Philosophical Concept of Metaphor In their treatment of metaphor, both Derrida and Kristeva make clear that their attempt to raise the question of metaphor anew should not be interpreted as a naïve privileging of the concept, as it has traditionally been defined in rhetoric and philosophy. Indeed, they consciously situate their metaphorologies post Heidegger's firm relegation of metaphor to the realm of metaphysics. Drawing on Heidegger's discussion, they argue that the dependence of the philosophical concept of metaphor on the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible renders it the master-category of metaphysics, its very possibility as a movement of idealization meta ta physika (i.e. outside/beyond natural phenomena). At the same time, they draw attention to the indebtedness of the classical philosophical understanding of metaphor (since Aristotle's first systematic treatment of it) to the concept of resemblance or analogy. As Derrida suggests, it is not an accident that Aristotle's discussion of metaphor forms part of his treatise on mimesis that opens the Poetics. Situated thus, metaphor, like poetry, is perceived as an effect of doubling-the doubling by renaming of truth, nature, the proper or the name as proper-and of resemblance-the act of erasing the difference of the double in recognizing it as analogous (i.e. other and yet the same). This is, in fact, according to Derrida, what inscribes metaphor within Aristotle's ontological chain, a chain that binds naming
by John Lechte and Maria Margaroni
Contents Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Maria Margaroni... more by John Lechte and Maria Margaroni
Contents Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Maria Margaroni and John Lechte
Chapter 1: The Semiotic Revolution: Lost Causes, Uncomfortable Remainders, Binding Futures Maria Margaroni T
Chapter 2: The Trial of the Third: Kristeva's Oedipus and the Crisis of Identification Maria Margaroni
Chapter 3: Love and Death by Any Other Name... (On Love and Melancholia) John Lechte
Chapter 4: Violence, Ethics and Transcendence: Kristeva and Levinas John Lechte
Chapter 5: The Imaginary and the Spectacle: Kristeva's View John Lechte
Maria Margaroni and Effie Yiannopoulou, Rodopi Press, 2006
This collection of essays investigates the convergence between the postmodern politics of mobilit... more This collection of essays investigates the convergence between the postmodern politics of mobility and a politics of metaphor, a politics, in other words, in the context of which the production and displacement of meaning(s) constitute the major stakes. Ranging from discussions of re-territorialization, multiculturalism, 'digisporas' and transnational politics and ethics, to September 11th, the Pentagon's New Map, American legislation on Chinese immigration, Gianni Amelio's film Lamerica, Keith Piper's online installations and Doris Salcedo's Atrabiliarios, the collection aims to follow three different theoretical trajectories. First, it seeks to rethink our concepts of mobility in order to open them up to the complexity that structures the thoughts and practices of a global order. Second, it critically examines the privileged position of concepts and metaphors of mobility within postmodern theory. In juxtaposing conflictual theoretical formulations, the book sets out to present the competing responses that fuel academic debates around this issue. Finally, it evaluates the influence of our increasingly mobile conceptual frameworks and everyday experience on the redefinition of politics that is currently under way, especially in the context of Post-Marxist theory. Its hope is to contribute to the production of alternative political positions and practices that will address the conflicting desires for attachment and movement marking postmodernity.
Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma, 2020
Our co-edited book has the following structure:
Arleen Ionescu, Maria Margaroni, Introduction
Pa... more Our co-edited book has the following structure: Arleen Ionescu, Maria Margaroni, Introduction
Part I: Holocaust Trauma and the Ambivalence of Healing: Irreverent Takes 1. Ivan Callus (University of Malta), Unfamiliar Healing: Reconsidering the Fragment in Narratives of Holocaust Trauma 2. Arleen Ionescu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Forgiving as Self-Healing? The Case of Eva Mozes Kor 3. Lucia Ispas (University of Ploiești), (Mis)Representing Trauma through Humour: Roberto Benigniʼs La vita è bella
Part II: Mass Trauma, Art and the Healing Politics of Place
4. Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam), Improving Public Space: Trauma Art and Retrospective-Futuristic Healing 5. Ernst van Alphen (University of Leiden), Transforming Trauma into Memory 6. Radhika Mohanram (Cardiff University), Textures of Indian Memories 7. Irene Scicluna (Cardiff University), How Do We Mourn? A Look at Makeshift Memorials
Part III: Intimate Healing
8. Laurent Milesi (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Literature between Antidote and Black Magic: The Autofiction of Chloé Delaume 9. Olga Michael (University of Central Lancashire, Cyprus), Queer Trauma, Paternal Loss, and Graphic Healing in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 10. Nicholas Chare (University of Montréal), Concrete Loss: Attesting to Trauma in Teresa Margolles’s Karla, Hilario Reyes Gallegos 11. Maria Margaroni (University of Cyprus), The Monstrosity of the New Wounded: Thinking Trauma, Survival and Resistance with Catherine Malabou and Julia Kristeva
Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma, 2020
'Covering a diverse range of writers and thinkers across literature, film, architecture, philosop... more 'Covering a diverse range of writers and thinkers across literature, film, architecture, philosophy and psychoanalysis, this collection of essays by prominent scholars of the theoretical humanities is a fascinating contribution to the study of the relation between culture and trauma. The diversity of historical and cultural phenomena explored, as well as the conceptual and textual sophistication of its analyses, will ensure this vol-ume's status as a primary text in the field for decades to come'.-JOSH COHEN, Goldsmiths, University of London 'Arts of Healing is an extremely significant volume addressing a timely issue of great importance and so advancing current debates in the field. The international and eminent contributors bring together the most contemporary theoretical and philosophical approaches, challenging literary and cultural texts and a range of traumatic events in global history in order to investigate the possibilities of cultural healing and articulate, without passing over suffering, ideas of "speaking anew"'.-ROBERT E AGLESTONE, Royal Holloway, University of London 'In this all-too-timely collection, Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni have assembled essays that thoughtfully draw upon the critical resources of the humanities to reflect on the conditions and limits of old as well as new arts of healing. As they follow through on the editors' commitment to move beyond a general concept of trauma, the richly diverse perspectives represented in this volume crucially challenge commonplace notions of healing as an individual, communal, or national redemption of a lost sense of wholeness and sovereignty, thereby mapping a freshly futural orientation for trauma studies'.-K ARYN BALL, University of Alberta 'Giving up the overgeneralised concept of trauma, the contributors to this intriguing volume carefully investigate particular geopolitical, social and cultural contexts of individual and collective traumatic experiences. Whereas classical trauma studies emphasised these experiences' inaccessibility and unrepresentability, this book shifts attention to various possibilities and techniques of their healing'.-VL ADIMIR BITI, University of Vienna
Edited by: Maria Margaroni, Apostolos Lampropoulos and Christakis Chatzichristou Contributors: Fr... more Edited by: Maria Margaroni, Apostolos Lampropoulos and Christakis Chatzichristou Contributors: Frances Restuccia, John Lechte, Judith Wambacq, William Watkin, Micheal Beehler, Brendan Moran, Adnan Mahmutovic, Marios Constantinou, Gertrude Postl, Tina Chanter, S. K. Keltner, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, Elena Tzelepis
Textual Layering: Contact, Historicity, Critique sets out to rethink our relation to textual tradition against the background of several contemporary developments, including the emergence of digital culture, the increasing spectacularization of psychic and social life, the renegotiation of historical thinking, and the precarious position of the theoretical humanities within academia. To this end, this volume reinvests in "layering," a concept currently used in a wide range of fields, including metaphor studies and linguistics, cybernetics, the social sciences, art, and architecture. Drawing on existing definitions of "layering," the chapters in this book return to and reappraise some of the most crucial concerns in the post-1960s theoretical scene: concerns over the strained interplay between writing and the body; textuality and history; critique, différance, and the feminine; and memory, trace, and the immemorial. The aim of the diverse-often polemical-analyses carried out in this volume is to reactivate the critical force of textual tradition today through a renewed appreciation of its historical embeddedness and its libidinal sources, as well as its complex economy of separation and contact, diachronicity and synchronicity, and (re)layering and de-layering. This collection will be of interest to scholars of continental philosophy, literary theory, gender studies, architecture, film and visual culture studies, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, post-colonial studies, and political and social theory.
's exhibited work is an explosive multiverse of possibilities, woven together (patiently, meticul... more 's exhibited work is an explosive multiverse of possibilities, woven together (patiently, meticulously) out of the muffled violence of a space that rises and tears up the canvas like a wave, folds close like a mourning gown or a shroud, erupts as a block of ice or a soulless sun, takes on the shape of a rose bruised by cold weather or the inert density of a body contorted by pain. This space extends and attracts every form of life in the paintings. It is a web-like trap that receives and absorbs Being like a womb. The signifier for this all-consuming womb in Pascali's paintings is a textured, layered white, the color of what the visual artist calls "slow death". In an essay dedicated to Jean Paulhan, Maurice Blanchot draws a distinction between "the ease of dying" and death as the experience of the impossible par excellence. Blanchot tells us that the ease of dying is what "hides us from death," what "makes us neglect or forget to die" (310). It helps us avoid the temptation of death, death's undeniable, irresistible attraction (304). This ease of dying, then, is a form of vigilance over death (311), a ruse to combat what we can only acknowledge as the thought of a scandal: "dying-impossibility-is easy" (316). In the same way, the slow death Marion Pascali sets in motion in her art is a duplicitous gesture that suspends and cancels out the scandal by re-enacting it, thus holding the impossible hostage to repetition, subjecting the singular to the playful deferral of the series. Though a suspension of the death sentence, Blanchot's "easy dying" is, nevertheless, a relationship to the discontinuity of being, an encounter with the impossible possibility of (our
Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique and Thought, 2023
One of the major contributions of Julia Kristeva in all the diverse fields of study she has w... more One of the major contributions of Julia Kristeva in all the diverse fields of study she has worked in since her emergence as a theorist of semiotics and avant-garde literature in the mid-1960s is her attention to the body and the bodily. Some of her central concepts of that period, such as the semiotic, semanalysis, the chora, and signifiance, have helped theorists in the Arts and Humanities but also in the Social and Medical sciences do justice to the complex vulnerability of the subject-in-process/on trial at the crossroads between biology and language. It is significant that she comes to develop the concept of the subject-in-process/on trial in a 1972 essay on Antonin Artaud, whose corporeal understanding of writing enabled Kristeva to theorize a literary experience that refuses to aestheticize psychic or bodily suffering and that aims to become a laboratory for the incubation of new, less species-arrogant perceptions of the human.
Julia Kristeva has revolutionized the study of modernism by developing a theoretical approach uni... more Julia Kristeva has revolutionized the study of modernism by developing a theoretical approach uniquely attuned to the dynamic interplay among linguistic and formal experimentation, subjective crisis and socio-political upheaval. Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism takes up key threads in Kristeva's analyses of the avant-garde, offering an appreciation of her overall contribution, the intellectual and political horizon within which she has produced her seminal works as well as of the blind spots that need to be acknowledged in any contemporary examination of her insights.
... As Bal argues in her analysis of the work of Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo, this act shoul... more ... As Bal argues in her analysis of the work of Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo, this act should be perceived as involving not ... In a similar vein, in their discussion of international population movements, Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller emphasize that, though migrations have ...
Textual Layering: Contact, Historicity, Critique sets out to rethink our relation to textual trad... more Textual Layering: Contact, Historicity, Critique sets out to rethink our relation to textual tradition against the background of several contemporary developments, including the emergence of digital culture, the increasing spectacularization of psychic as well as social life, the renegotia-tion of historical thinking, and the precarious position of the theoretical humanities within academia. To this end, the volume reinvests the concept of "layering," a concept currently used in a wide range of fields, including metaphor studies and linguistics, cybernetics, the social sciences, art, and architecture. Drawing on existing definitions of "layering," the chapters in this book return to and re-appraise some of the most crucial concerns in the post-1960s theoretical scene: that is, concerns over the strained interplay between writing and the body; textuality and history; critique, différance and the feminine; memory, trace, and the immemorial. The aim of the diverse-often polemical-analyses carried out in this volume is to reactivate the critical force of textual tradition today through a renewed appreciation of its historical embeddedness, its libidinal sources, as well as its complex economy of separation and contact, dia-chronicity and synchronicity, (re)layering and de-layering.
Contributors: Frances Restuccia, John Lechte, Judith Wambacq, William Watkin, Micheal Beehler, Brendan Moran, Adnan Mahmutovic, Marios Constantinou, Gertrude Postl, Tina Chanter, S. K. Keltner, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, Elena Tzelepis.
On the Nude: Looking Anew at the Naked Body in Art, edited by Nicholas Chare and Ersy Contogouris, 2021
In this chapter I am trying to rethink the nude body in connection with the category of the “raw”... more In this chapter I am trying to rethink the nude body in connection with the category of the “raw”, referring to food that is not cooked but also to what is inflamed and feels sore, sensitive, tender. With close reference to Levi-Strauss’s analysis in The Raw and the Cooked, I focus on Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover where, I argue, processes of denudation (stripping the living or dead body to its “soft part”) and cooking (employing the art of fire or art as fire to restore the protective skin that has been lost) become central in the director’s allegorical tale of flesh and its passions in neo-liberal capitalism.
The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva, ed. Sara Beardsworth, 2020
This essay explores the contexts and stakes of Kristeva's persistent theorizing of the literary e... more This essay explores the contexts and stakes of Kristeva's persistent theorizing of the literary experience in connection with the vicissitudes of the subjective and linguistic crisis that we associate with madness. I aim to throw into relief the distinctness of Kristeva's approach to the madness of literature and to trace how this approach informs both her materialist rethinking of the "realm of the beautiful" and her unique position in the confrontation between humanist and antihumanist currents in this realm. I seek to demonstrate that Artaud's experience of madness and his corporeal understanding of writing enable Kristeva to define a type of literary experience that refuses to function as a band aid to human suffering, developing instead as the stage of cruelty Artaud envisioned, where Man is confronted by what emerges out of the shadows of the obscene: the convulsing body-in-pain.
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2004
This chapter focuses on books published in the field of Continental Philosophy in 2002. It is div... more This chapter focuses on books published in the field of Continental Philosophy in 2002. It is divided into four sections: 1. Anthologies; 2. Philosophies of the Virtual; 3. Freedom between Ethics and Politics; 4. Dialogues with the Incommensurable.
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2009
This chapter focuses on books published in the field of Continental Philosophy in 2007 and is div... more This chapter focuses on books published in the field of Continental Philosophy in 2007 and is divided into two sections: 1. Assembling the Lacanian Left in a Post-Democratic Age: The Passion for the Real and the Aesthetics of Emancipation from Castoriadis to Badiou; 2. Giorgio Agamben and the Infantile Task of Philosophy. Section 1 is by Marios Constantinou; Section 2 by Maria Margaroni
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2007
This chapter focuses on books published in the field of Continental Philosophy in 2005 and is div... more This chapter focuses on books published in the field of Continental Philosophy in 2005 and is divided into four sections: 1. Reference Works; 2. 'AND'; 3. Continental Philosophy between the Sacred and the Political; 4. Messianic Tensions of Law and the State of Exception in the Current Work of Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben. Sections 1, 2 and 3 are by Maria Margaroni; section 4 by Marios Constantinou.
The Year S Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2005
This chapter focuses on books published in the field of Continental philosophy in 2003 and is div... more This chapter focuses on books published in the field of Continental philosophy in 2003 and is divided into three sections: 1. Introductory Books/Anthologies; 2. Continental Ethics; 3. A Baudrillard Double Bill.
Review of Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid. Ed. Mi... more Review of Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid. Ed. Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan.
Are you getting or have already received an MA in Ancient or Medieval History, Art History, Byzan... more Are you getting or have already received an MA in Ancient or Medieval History, Art History, Byzantine Studies, Classics, Cultural Heritage Studies, Medieval Studies, Philology (Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, or Latin), Religious Studies, or Studies in Medievalism? Are you interested in participating in an international, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral programme of doctoral training recruiting a group of highly-competent fellows? The StoryPharm consortium publishes a call for 19 PhD fellowships within the training programme “Storytelling as Pharmakon in Premodernity and Beyond: Training the New Generation of Researchers in Health Humanities”. The fellowships are funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action – Doctoral Networks, Grant Agreement 101169114. https://www.ucy.ac.cy/storypharm/vacancies/
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Journal essays by Maria Margaroni
The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of “the beginning before the
Beginning.” The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between
incommensurable entities: the “demonic” and the social, desire and the Law, material
production and representation. 1 contend: (I) that the introduction of the chora
in RPL is part of Kristeva’s effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of
the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato’s Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows
her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva’s
part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our
transcendence to the “demonic” lies less “beyond us” than “in-between.”
Books by Maria Margaroni
Contents Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Maria Margaroni and John Lechte
Chapter 1: The Semiotic Revolution: Lost Causes, Uncomfortable Remainders, Binding Futures Maria Margaroni T
Chapter 2: The Trial of the Third: Kristeva's Oedipus and the Crisis of Identification Maria Margaroni
Chapter 3: Love and Death by Any Other Name... (On Love and Melancholia) John Lechte
Chapter 4: Violence, Ethics and Transcendence: Kristeva and Levinas John Lechte
Chapter 5: The Imaginary and the Spectacle: Kristeva's View John Lechte
Interview: Sharing Singularity
Bibliography
Index
The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of “the beginning before the
Beginning.” The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between
incommensurable entities: the “demonic” and the social, desire and the Law, material
production and representation. 1 contend: (I) that the introduction of the chora
in RPL is part of Kristeva’s effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of
the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato’s Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows
her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva’s
part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our
transcendence to the “demonic” lies less “beyond us” than “in-between.”
Contents Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Maria Margaroni and John Lechte
Chapter 1: The Semiotic Revolution: Lost Causes, Uncomfortable Remainders, Binding Futures Maria Margaroni T
Chapter 2: The Trial of the Third: Kristeva's Oedipus and the Crisis of Identification Maria Margaroni
Chapter 3: Love and Death by Any Other Name... (On Love and Melancholia) John Lechte
Chapter 4: Violence, Ethics and Transcendence: Kristeva and Levinas John Lechte
Chapter 5: The Imaginary and the Spectacle: Kristeva's View John Lechte
Interview: Sharing Singularity
Bibliography
Index
Arleen Ionescu, Maria Margaroni, Introduction
Part I: Holocaust Trauma and the Ambivalence of Healing: Irreverent Takes
1. Ivan Callus (University of Malta), Unfamiliar Healing: Reconsidering the Fragment in Narratives of Holocaust Trauma
2. Arleen Ionescu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Forgiving as Self-Healing? The Case of Eva Mozes Kor
3. Lucia Ispas (University of Ploiești), (Mis)Representing Trauma through Humour: Roberto Benigniʼs La vita è bella
Part II: Mass Trauma, Art and the Healing Politics of Place
4. Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam), Improving Public Space: Trauma Art and Retrospective-Futuristic Healing
5. Ernst van Alphen (University of Leiden), Transforming Trauma into Memory
6. Radhika Mohanram (Cardiff University), Textures of Indian Memories
7. Irene Scicluna (Cardiff University), How Do We Mourn? A Look at Makeshift Memorials
Part III: Intimate Healing
8. Laurent Milesi (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Literature between Antidote and Black Magic: The Autofiction of Chloé Delaume
9. Olga Michael (University of Central Lancashire, Cyprus), Queer Trauma, Paternal Loss, and Graphic Healing in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
10. Nicholas Chare (University of Montréal), Concrete Loss: Attesting to Trauma in Teresa Margolles’s Karla, Hilario Reyes Gallegos
11. Maria Margaroni (University of Cyprus), The Monstrosity of the New Wounded: Thinking Trauma, Survival and Resistance with Catherine Malabou and Julia Kristeva
'Arts of Healing is an extremely significant volume addressing a timely issue of great importance and so advancing current debates in the field. The international and eminent contributors bring together the most contemporary theoretical and philosophical approaches, challenging literary and cultural texts and a range of traumatic events in global history in order to investigate the possibilities of cultural healing and articulate, without passing over suffering, ideas of "speaking anew"'.-ROBERT E AGLESTONE, Royal Holloway, University of London
'In this all-too-timely collection, Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni have assembled essays that thoughtfully draw upon the critical resources of the humanities to reflect on the conditions and limits of old as well as new arts of healing. As they follow through on the editors' commitment to move beyond a general concept of trauma, the richly diverse perspectives represented in this volume crucially challenge commonplace notions of healing as an individual, communal, or national redemption of a lost sense of wholeness and sovereignty, thereby mapping a freshly futural orientation for trauma studies'.-K ARYN BALL, University of Alberta
'Giving up the overgeneralised concept of trauma, the contributors to this intriguing volume carefully investigate particular geopolitical, social and cultural contexts of individual and collective traumatic experiences. Whereas classical trauma studies emphasised these experiences' inaccessibility and unrepresentability, this book shifts attention to various possibilities and techniques of their healing'.-VL ADIMIR BITI, University of Vienna
Textual Layering: Contact, Historicity, Critique sets out to rethink our relation to textual tradition against the background of several contemporary developments, including the emergence of digital culture, the increasing spectacularization of psychic and social life, the renegotiation of historical thinking, and the precarious position of the theoretical humanities within academia. To this end, this volume reinvests in "layering," a concept currently used in a wide range of fields, including metaphor studies and linguistics, cybernetics, the social sciences, art, and architecture. Drawing on existing definitions of "layering," the chapters in this book return to and reappraise some of the most crucial concerns in the post-1960s theoretical scene: concerns over the strained interplay between writing and the body; textuality and history; critique, différance, and the feminine; and memory, trace, and the immemorial. The aim of the diverse-often polemical-analyses carried out in this volume is to reactivate the critical force of textual tradition today through a renewed appreciation of its historical embeddedness and its libidinal sources, as well as its complex economy of separation and contact, diachronicity and synchronicity, and (re)layering and de-layering. This collection will be of interest to scholars of continental philosophy, literary theory, gender studies, architecture, film and visual culture studies, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, post-colonial studies, and political and social theory.
Contributors: Frances Restuccia, John Lechte, Judith Wambacq, William Watkin, Micheal Beehler, Brendan Moran, Adnan Mahmutovic, Marios Constantinou, Gertrude Postl, Tina Chanter, S. K. Keltner, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, Elena Tzelepis.
The StoryPharm consortium publishes a call for 19 PhD fellowships within the training programme “Storytelling as Pharmakon in Premodernity and Beyond: Training the New Generation of Researchers in Health Humanities”. The fellowships are funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action – Doctoral Networks, Grant Agreement 101169114.
https://www.ucy.ac.cy/storypharm/vacancies/