Papers by David Nowell Smith
Revue Française d'Études Américaines, 2017
This essay looks at the history of attempting to 'scan' poems through scoring them, whether throu... more This essay looks at the history of attempting to 'scan' poems through scoring them, whether through musical notation or by attempting to produce a visual record of oral-aural performance. The appeal to musical notation seems both to offer a more precise account of the subjective experience of verse, and a more objective system of scansion; but in this is bound up with several metaphysical and ideological assumptions about harmony and rhythm, and seeks to override the contingencies of performance. Scansions, the essay argues, should be seen not as recordings of ideal performance, but cues for future performance.
Critical Quarterly, 2016
This essay reads Michel Houellebecq's 2015 novel Soumission within crises of French politics and ... more This essay reads Michel Houellebecq's 2015 novel Soumission within crises of French politics and Western (neo)liberalism more generally, by tracing a critique of sexual-economic liberalism as a 'regime of desire' that has run throughout the last two decades of Houellebecq's oeuvre. It argues that Soumission represents a culmination of Houellebecq's project, as it moves beyond critique of contemporary liberalism into a speculative account of how we might live beyond the malaise liberalism has bequeathed to us: the metaphysical principle of 'submission'. However, the essay points out, Houellebecq’s own account is vitiated by its own structural misogyny, something it shares with the sexual-economic liberalism it excoriates. It finishes by suggesting that it is only by seeing this structural misogyny that we might recuperate a notion of ‘submission’ that moves beyond subject-object exploitation.
Paper given at Harvard University, German Circle Colloquium, 30 March 2014
Paper given at the Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen, 30 October 2014
Palimpsestes 26, Sep 2013
1 Au début du 'Der Weg zur Sprache' (1959) Heidegger propose comme fil conducteur la phrase die S... more 1 Au début du 'Der Weg zur Sprache' (1959) Heidegger propose comme fil conducteur la phrase die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen. Ce qui m'intéresse ici, c'est le rôle du zur dans cette phrase : c'est-à-dire, comment ces trois conceptions du langage sont mises en relation. Il me semble bien que ce qu'appelle Heidegger die Sprache n'est rien d'autre que ce mettre-en-relation, et qu'il conçoit ceci dans sa directionnalité et son dynamisme : Be-wëgung avec son trait d'union qui indique que ce mouvement est toujours un mettre-en-route.
Etudes britanniques contemporaines 45 (2013)
Textual Practice, Nov 21, 2012
This essay argues that Heidegger's critique of metaphor and figurative language, both within phil... more This essay argues that Heidegger's critique of metaphor and figurative language, both within philosophical idiom and the reading of poetry, constitutes an original and far-reaching contribution to this issue. In particular, it focuses on Heidegger's insistence that the import of metaphor for philosophy and poetry lies in its structural dependence, as meta-pherein or Über-tragung (carrying-over), on the dualism between sensuous and nonsensuous realms. In this, the critique opens on to a far more developed thinking on the relation between bodily experience and linguistic cognition, and in particular an attempt to think of the body as a site for an ‘articulation’ of language anterior to any opposition of sound and sense. It is in order to think that by this bodily articulation of language the question of ‘poetic’ figure becomes particularly crucial for Heidegger, and the article ends by suggesting directions for us to take Heidegger's insights into poetic figure that would reach beyond the confines of Heidegger's own work.
Radical Philosophy, Jan 1, 2010
Etudes britanniques contemporaines, Jan 1, 2010
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Papers by David Nowell Smith