Inoperativity

In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to think of the discourse of the animal in musical terms, and if so, whether one could change the key, or the tone of the music, by inserting a “flat”—a “blue note” in other words. The task would be to render audible “an unheard language or music” that would be “somewhat inhuman” but a language nonetheless. This essay pursues this intriguing proposition by means of a reading Kafka’s “Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk,” paying careful attention to the controversy regarding the status of Josephine’s vocalizations, which, moreover, is mirrored in the scientific discourse surrounding the ultrasonic songs of mice. What is at stake in rendering this inhuman music audible? And furthermore, how might we relate this debate to questions of narrative and above all to the concept of narrative “voice”? I explore these and related questions via a series of theoretical waypoints, including Paul Sheehan, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, with a view to establishing some of the critical parameters of an “animal narratology,” and of zoopoetics more generally.

The present thesis aims to trace and detect the Agambenian state of exception in various layers of The Crucible. On an adaptational, performative and testimonial level, this thesis argues, thresholds and zones of indeterminacy are originated in the play. As law is suspended in the state of emergency, the source text is held in abeyance and rendered inoperative in the act of adaptation. This process is instigated when a zone of indistinction is molded between the source text and its performance on the stage. Focusing on the zones of indeterminacy, the present study treats Yaël Farber’s stage production of The Crucible as a work of adaptation, and not solely a production to be examined based on Arthur Miller’s text. Firstly, the state of exception is traced in the zone of indistinction between the stage and the text in the second chapter. Based on this approach, Farber’s stage production and Miller’s text are analyzed in the context of their divergent points. By examining the source text and the adapted work in the binary of potentiality/actuality, a methodology will emerge that highlights the process of adaptation as a dynamic river running through different historical eras that brings the contingent.
Turning to the gestural and performative aspects of The Crucible, the thesis brings the trope of hysteria in the performance of the play and the body of the actors into focus. Specifically, it is the oscillation between the intentionality of the human and the automatism of the feral that guides the analysis of the hysterical performance of homo sacer and its bare life as a life that is neither human nor animal in Salem, Massachusetts. Against the backdrop of The Crucible, the last chapter of the body meets the act of adaptation that commenced the body of the thesis. This chapter proposes to expose the links between the act of adaptation and the hysterical performance of homo sacer as they are both haunted by the againness inherent in testimony. Here, the repetitive cycles that experience change in the hysterical performance are linked to the act of adaptation as a type of repetition with variation. On that account, this pattern leads to the term hysteriadaptation to explain the againness of the act of adaptation in the light of contingency. The lack of closure in both testimony and the contingency of adaptation are consequently detected in the hysterical performance of homo sacer with a life that is stripped to its biological foundations in The Crucible. In this last chapter of the body of the thesis, the performance of testimony is claimed to be a resistance to the split between the living and speaking being occurring in bare life. Overall, it is the paradigm of the state of exception which finds its spatialization in the camp that drives the thesis forward in its ring-shaped and circular movement as it analyzes the performance of homo sacer and bare life in Miller’s play and Farber’s staged performance.
Keywords: State of Exception, Adaptation, Hysteria, Homo Sacer, Bare Life, Yaël Farber, Giorgio Agamben, Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Oobleck  is  two  things:  a  non-Newtonian  fluid,  a  mixture  of  cornstarch  and  water  showing  properties  of  both  a  liquid  and  a  solid;  and  an  invention  by  Dr.  Seuss,  an  odd  green  weather  occurrence  whose  fluid,  adhesive,  and  elastic  attributes  manage  to  threaten the  entire  state  apparatus of the “Kingdom of Didd.” Re-viewing the children’s book Bartholomew and the Oobleck, and in light of its starch-and-water namesake, I argue that we can learn an insurrective strategy of political resistance from its performativity.

This paper is part of a larger project studying how black thinkers communally generated a black radical pedagogy in and through their responses to European political discourses. I focus on a selection of understudied January 1st orations that commemorate the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and which were delivered by members of the black community at Churches and philanthropic organizations in NY and Philadelphia from 1808 to 1823. I argue that this genre's political and theological renomination of Western imperialism as evil epistemologically challenges the 'just war doctrine' that US founders used to logically reconcile their fight against political slavery and for chattel slavery. In response to this dual rhetorical goal, black thinkers practiced a radical pedagogy that antagonistically appropriated theology to recontextualize western mythologies within a transnational socio-ethico-political history of the oppressed. I argue that the rhetorical strategies practiced by January 1st orators disrupt what philosopher Charles W. Mills calls "a partitioned social ontology...divided between persons and racial subpersons" (Mills 16). This tradition can pedagogically model for our students that revolutionary change begins with a discomforting practice of radical honesty-a practice that names the material realities of Western White settler colonialism. My project contributes to the scholarly conversation on this genre by drawing attention to the fact that their practice of resistance exists in and through nomination.