Papers by Peter J. Meedom
I 1888 skrev zoolog J.A. Bøving, at "Naar saaledes vi og alt det vi kender, er relativt og forand... more I 1888 skrev zoolog J.A. Bøving, at "Naar saaledes vi og alt det vi kender, er relativt og foranderligt, hvor vilde det da ikke vaere en Utopi, Haabet om at finde en dogmefast Form, en snorlige Kanal hvori vor naturopfattelse kunde hvile ud." Bøving havde uden tvivl ret dengang i slutningen af det nittende århundrede, men måske er det først nu, i det enogtyvende århundrede, at vores natursyn igen begynder at aendre sig?
Om de uløselige forbindelser mellem sprog og dyr i tidlig modernisme og den humanimale krop
Filosofisk Supplement, May 23, 2014
Thesis Chapters by Peter J. Meedom
[MA Thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2012]
The subject of this thesis is modernist literature's... more [MA Thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2012]
The subject of this thesis is modernist literature's problematizing of the ability of language (logos) to make visible that which does not express itself with words (alogon): living bodies, both as interiors and exteriors – but also the matter of words. Everything that exists is a body, which can never be fully expressed in language, and since language exists, language cannot ever express itself.
The definition of Man in the Western tradition has based itself on a dialectical exclusion of the Animal since the time of Plato. This dialectical exclusion typically claims that Man has logos opposed to the Animal’s lack of being able to have it (Derrida). The animalogical limit undergirds the liminal-hierarchical ontology of the Great Chain of Being that in spite of Darwin continues to this day in the guise of the opposition Nature/Culture – what could be called the long afterlife of the classic logos. On the other hand, the modern logos inaugurated by Darwin strives to represent alogon as historical and excessive (consequences surpass their causes). Thus the classic and modern logos are founded in two ontologies: the classic determines alogon as tautologically-determined; the modern strives to conceive of alogon as excessively-incarnated – the living is historical.
When the role and function of logos changes, so does the conceptual bind of human and animal. In this thesis modernism is another way of saying that humans no longer have language. The main claim of the thesis, then, is that the early modernism of Flaubert and Mallarmé precisely attempted a re-ordering of logos and thus of the alogon with the invention of écriture. The birth of écriture happened when literature rejected the representational restraints of ”Belles Lettres” as Rancière argues. The great discovery by these authors is that you cannot represent alogon by way of speaking it – neither as endogenous (words as bodies) nor exogenous (non-articulated living bodies) –, because that would result in silencing alogon with speech. Yet the modernist logos does not illude an autonomous logos of pure signification. A close reading of Trois Contes (1877) and Mallarmé's vertiginous prose piece ”Un spectacle interrompu” (1875) reveals that the authors consider logos and alogon not as opposing entities, but as intimately entwined. Flaubert's farewell to the romanticist belief in access to all kinds of interiors turns into a quest to incarnate silence and let the reader imagine for herself what kind of discourse Félicité and the parrot could have – this is the bête fiction he aspired to. The very symbol of hermetic avant-garde poetics, Mallarmé, turns out to be formally engaged in creating a democratic theater of reflexive fiction where no one denies that they are in fact spiders spinning webs.
Book Reviews by Peter J. Meedom
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Papers by Peter J. Meedom
Thesis Chapters by Peter J. Meedom
The subject of this thesis is modernist literature's problematizing of the ability of language (logos) to make visible that which does not express itself with words (alogon): living bodies, both as interiors and exteriors – but also the matter of words. Everything that exists is a body, which can never be fully expressed in language, and since language exists, language cannot ever express itself.
The definition of Man in the Western tradition has based itself on a dialectical exclusion of the Animal since the time of Plato. This dialectical exclusion typically claims that Man has logos opposed to the Animal’s lack of being able to have it (Derrida). The animalogical limit undergirds the liminal-hierarchical ontology of the Great Chain of Being that in spite of Darwin continues to this day in the guise of the opposition Nature/Culture – what could be called the long afterlife of the classic logos. On the other hand, the modern logos inaugurated by Darwin strives to represent alogon as historical and excessive (consequences surpass their causes). Thus the classic and modern logos are founded in two ontologies: the classic determines alogon as tautologically-determined; the modern strives to conceive of alogon as excessively-incarnated – the living is historical.
When the role and function of logos changes, so does the conceptual bind of human and animal. In this thesis modernism is another way of saying that humans no longer have language. The main claim of the thesis, then, is that the early modernism of Flaubert and Mallarmé precisely attempted a re-ordering of logos and thus of the alogon with the invention of écriture. The birth of écriture happened when literature rejected the representational restraints of ”Belles Lettres” as Rancière argues. The great discovery by these authors is that you cannot represent alogon by way of speaking it – neither as endogenous (words as bodies) nor exogenous (non-articulated living bodies) –, because that would result in silencing alogon with speech. Yet the modernist logos does not illude an autonomous logos of pure signification. A close reading of Trois Contes (1877) and Mallarmé's vertiginous prose piece ”Un spectacle interrompu” (1875) reveals that the authors consider logos and alogon not as opposing entities, but as intimately entwined. Flaubert's farewell to the romanticist belief in access to all kinds of interiors turns into a quest to incarnate silence and let the reader imagine for herself what kind of discourse Félicité and the parrot could have – this is the bête fiction he aspired to. The very symbol of hermetic avant-garde poetics, Mallarmé, turns out to be formally engaged in creating a democratic theater of reflexive fiction where no one denies that they are in fact spiders spinning webs.
Book Reviews by Peter J. Meedom
The subject of this thesis is modernist literature's problematizing of the ability of language (logos) to make visible that which does not express itself with words (alogon): living bodies, both as interiors and exteriors – but also the matter of words. Everything that exists is a body, which can never be fully expressed in language, and since language exists, language cannot ever express itself.
The definition of Man in the Western tradition has based itself on a dialectical exclusion of the Animal since the time of Plato. This dialectical exclusion typically claims that Man has logos opposed to the Animal’s lack of being able to have it (Derrida). The animalogical limit undergirds the liminal-hierarchical ontology of the Great Chain of Being that in spite of Darwin continues to this day in the guise of the opposition Nature/Culture – what could be called the long afterlife of the classic logos. On the other hand, the modern logos inaugurated by Darwin strives to represent alogon as historical and excessive (consequences surpass their causes). Thus the classic and modern logos are founded in two ontologies: the classic determines alogon as tautologically-determined; the modern strives to conceive of alogon as excessively-incarnated – the living is historical.
When the role and function of logos changes, so does the conceptual bind of human and animal. In this thesis modernism is another way of saying that humans no longer have language. The main claim of the thesis, then, is that the early modernism of Flaubert and Mallarmé precisely attempted a re-ordering of logos and thus of the alogon with the invention of écriture. The birth of écriture happened when literature rejected the representational restraints of ”Belles Lettres” as Rancière argues. The great discovery by these authors is that you cannot represent alogon by way of speaking it – neither as endogenous (words as bodies) nor exogenous (non-articulated living bodies) –, because that would result in silencing alogon with speech. Yet the modernist logos does not illude an autonomous logos of pure signification. A close reading of Trois Contes (1877) and Mallarmé's vertiginous prose piece ”Un spectacle interrompu” (1875) reveals that the authors consider logos and alogon not as opposing entities, but as intimately entwined. Flaubert's farewell to the romanticist belief in access to all kinds of interiors turns into a quest to incarnate silence and let the reader imagine for herself what kind of discourse Félicité and the parrot could have – this is the bête fiction he aspired to. The very symbol of hermetic avant-garde poetics, Mallarmé, turns out to be formally engaged in creating a democratic theater of reflexive fiction where no one denies that they are in fact spiders spinning webs.