Greg Hainge
I am Professor of French in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland, Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
I am the Editor in Chief of Culture, Theory and Critique and an editor of the following journals: French Screen Studies; Contemporary French Civilization; Études Céliniennes; Corps: Revue Interdisciplinaire; I also serve on the editorial advisory board of Altitude and the Open Humanities Press book series Media : Art : Write : Now.
I co-edit a book series for Bloomsbury Academic with Paul Hegarty. Called "ex:centrics", this is a series of books on contemporary art and music examining people, practices and movements from the space in-between, neither mainstream nor underground.
I have recently authored the first monograph to be published on the French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux. In 2013 I published a book on the philosophy of noise that includes chapters on, amongst other things, noise in Hollywood horror films, the German photographer Thomas Ruff, maverick American film maker David Lynch, Japanese noise God Merzbow (aka Masami Akita), as well as discussions of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Michel Serres, Jean-Paul Sartre..... For details see the publications section of this site.
I have also published a monograph on Céline which interfaces the later works of this most infamous of French authors with the poststructuralist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as numerous book chapters on many different topics in film studies, cultural studies, literary studies, new media studies, experimental music, Critical Theory, popular music… Where copyright embargos have passed, post-print versions of some of these papers can be found on this site or in UQ's open access institutional digital repository: http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/
Phone: +61 (0)7 33652282
Address: SLCCS, University of Queensland
St Lucia Qld 4072
Australia
I am the Editor in Chief of Culture, Theory and Critique and an editor of the following journals: French Screen Studies; Contemporary French Civilization; Études Céliniennes; Corps: Revue Interdisciplinaire; I also serve on the editorial advisory board of Altitude and the Open Humanities Press book series Media : Art : Write : Now.
I co-edit a book series for Bloomsbury Academic with Paul Hegarty. Called "ex:centrics", this is a series of books on contemporary art and music examining people, practices and movements from the space in-between, neither mainstream nor underground.
I have recently authored the first monograph to be published on the French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux. In 2013 I published a book on the philosophy of noise that includes chapters on, amongst other things, noise in Hollywood horror films, the German photographer Thomas Ruff, maverick American film maker David Lynch, Japanese noise God Merzbow (aka Masami Akita), as well as discussions of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Michel Serres, Jean-Paul Sartre..... For details see the publications section of this site.
I have also published a monograph on Céline which interfaces the later works of this most infamous of French authors with the poststructuralist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as numerous book chapters on many different topics in film studies, cultural studies, literary studies, new media studies, experimental music, Critical Theory, popular music… Where copyright embargos have passed, post-print versions of some of these papers can be found on this site or in UQ's open access institutional digital repository: http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/
Phone: +61 (0)7 33652282
Address: SLCCS, University of Queensland
St Lucia Qld 4072
Australia
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Books by Greg Hainge
“We all know noise is there, but Hainge finds it everywhere. Love it, hate it, damp it, make it, even tame it into art-but escape it? Never. For noise, as Hainge shows, is not mere sound; rather, it names the ontological impedance and affordance of all relations in our emergent cosmos. Read this remarkably stimulating, wide-ranging, original book and you’ll never hear or think of noise the same again.”
Ronald Bogue, Distinguished Research Professor, Comparative Literature Department, University Of Georgia
“Skillfully traversing experimental music, media studies, existential literature, horror films, contemporary philosophy and digital culture, among other subjects, Greg Hainge carefully unpacks the topic of noise to expose its deep complexity. His project to map an ontology of this elusive and pertinent topic raises the level precisely on why noise matters, and finally lends to identifying noise as an expansive and vibrant materiality.”
Brandon Labelle, Professor, Bergen Academy Of Art And Design, Norway, And Author Of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture And Everyday Life And Background Noise: Perspectives On Sound Art
“In the wave of the current resurgence of both popular and scholarly interest in noise, Noise Matters blasts noise out of the realm of the purely sonic and into much stranger and more unexpected territory. From its opening manifesto on noise as essentially a question of the movement and vibration of both material and immaterial bodies, Hainge is just as at home dealing with the noise in Sartre’s Nausea as he is with the cinema of David Lynch or the noise music of Merzbow. In all of these spheres, controversial claims are made and arguments undertaken that present noise in terms and genealogies other than the cliches about modernist noise that many of both its proponents and detractors would have us believe, ultimately constituting a form of vital noise in, and in relation to, contemporary noise studies and surrounding fields.”
Dr Michael Goddard, University Of Salford, UK And Co-Editor Of Reverberations And Resonances Endorsement
“In Noise Matters, we are brought into a world of perceptual yet often hidden noise: noise arises, noise comes to be, noise infiltrates all. Hainge’s skill is to trace the filaments of noise into their material expressions, traversing film, fiction, philosophy, music, machinery, digital and analogue.”
Paul Hegarty, Author Of Noise/Music And Co-Author Of Beyond And Before: Progressive Rock Since The 1960s Endorsement
This excellent book is an important contribution to our understanding of Céline’s writing from a psychoanalytic perspective. Céline’s concern with madness in his writing is one of the major features of his work, and one which has been consistently recognised by his critics. In fact, Céline’s “madness” takes two forms, one clinical and covering a wide range of psychological symptoms, and the other aesthetic and stylistic, operating in the domain of hallucination and dream and often expressed through the means of “délire”.
His professional interest in psychology is well-documented. The correspondence with Cillie Pam in the 1930s, following his visit to Vienna in 1933, when he met a number of Viennese (and Jewish) psychoanalysts, demonstrates an above average knowledge of Freud’s work and refers specifically to the essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, of 1916. At the same time, by 1936 and the publication of Bagatelles pour un massacre, Céline, through his narrator Ferdinand, is at pains to distance himself from Freud and invokes instead a non-Freudian interpretation of dreams, embodied in Léon Daudet’s Le Rêve éveillé, of 1926.
Similarly, in Céline’s fiction the interest in psychological abnormality is present right from the beginning. In the long essay La Quinine en thérapeutique, of 1926, Dr Destouches recounts the strange case of the obsessive and Molièresque Dr Bazire, who is so convinced of the healing properties of quinine that, when it fails to effect an immediate cure on his own ailment, proceeds to increase the dose until he dies. Similarly, Céline’s doctoral thesis on Semmelweis fictionalises the career of the Hungarian scientist, signified by the inversion of the name Ignace-Fulop to Philippe-Ignace, by turning him, literally, into a madman. This concern with abnormal psychology continues into the fiction signed under the name of Céline: Voyage au bout de la nuit can not merely be interpreted as a dream and hallucination, it deploys a first-person narrator who spends much of his time, literally, delirious: from the light-headedness on the café terrace which opens the novel, through the literal nervous collapse in Paris during the War, to the fever in the African jungle and the hallucinatory crossing of the Atlantic on a slave-galley. Much more obviously Freudian in inspiration, Mort à crédit is a chronicle of madness: the neurotic Auguste, the fanciful Courtial des Pereires, the despairing Nora, the retarded child Jonkind, and, finally, the narrator Ferdinand himself, whose response to the misery of his family-life and economic situation is autism. This classic psychoanalytical tale ends significantly enough with a classic nervous collapse and a retreat into non-being, or back to the womb, under Oncle Edouard’s pile of ‘pardessus’. That this is no resolution is conveyed by the madness and delirium still tracking the mature narrator. Finally, from Bagatelles pour un massacre onwards explores the use of a deranged first-person narrator whose madness is both exculpatory and blindingly insightful.
Unsurprisingly, Céline’s critics have paid considerable attention to this body of psychological material at the heart of his writing. As early as 1971, Albert Chesneau, in Psychocritique de Céline, saw Céline’s work as highly susceptible to analysis on the lines of Charles Maurron. Similarly, Nicole Debrie, Willy Szafran, Henri Godard and Marie-Christine Bellosta have explored in considerable detail Céline’s debt to Freud in particular and psychology in general.
A psychological or, indeed, psychoanalytical, approach to Céline’s work presents problems, however. In the first place, most psychological studies of Céline have tended at some time to be backed into a biographical or autobiographical interpretation, as if the neuroses portrayed and worked out in the novels could only stem from a reality grounded in biography. Here, the letters from Céline to Joseph Garcin are highly revealing: not only do they confirm his extensive knowledge of Freud, but they also an exclusively writerly relish for pastiching the 1930s vogue for psychoanalytical fiction. Not that this should be taken totally seriously—no more so that his claims that Voyage was a merely a response to fashionable First World War fiction—but it does indicate that the gallery of psychological victims in Mort à crédit, along with the neurotic, and often mad, narrator, in full “délire”, from Bagatelles onwards is the result of conscious artifice and not emotional momentum.
Similarly, psychological studies of Céline have rarely succeeded in integrating the psychological features of the work to is socio-economic concerns. Mort à crédit, with its acute awareness of the importance of gold and its extensive reflection of the life of petit-bourgeois turn-of-the-century Paris, is one of France’s major historical novels. And that historical dimension is intimately connected to the neurosis of its characters and the autism of its child-narrator and the delirium of his mature counterpart. In this respect, Ferdinand must be seen as literally and metaphorically schizophrenic.
Here, and it is the great merit of this book, the work of Deleuze and Guattari provides a compelling framework for the analysis of Céline’s writing, in that it enables the psychological, the socio-economic and, above all, the stylistic, to be fully integrated into one reading. Dr Hainge, with meticulous care and highly intelligent insight, takes us closer than we have ever been before to the psychological centre of Céline’s work.
Appraisal by Professor Michael Tilby, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge:
In this illuminating study, Hainge demonstrates that Céline's post-war novels are not to be explained in terms of pathological obsessions redeemed by the brilliance of the author's stylistic innovations. With the aid of an approach derived from the anti-interpretative practice of Deleuze and Guattari, he makes a compelling case for seeing the later Céline as the lucid author of a 'schizophrenic' text, concerned to monitor the success or failure of his own creative strategies. This is a major contribution to our understanding of a difficult, and frequently misunderstood, writer.
Papers by Greg Hainge
“We all know noise is there, but Hainge finds it everywhere. Love it, hate it, damp it, make it, even tame it into art-but escape it? Never. For noise, as Hainge shows, is not mere sound; rather, it names the ontological impedance and affordance of all relations in our emergent cosmos. Read this remarkably stimulating, wide-ranging, original book and you’ll never hear or think of noise the same again.”
Ronald Bogue, Distinguished Research Professor, Comparative Literature Department, University Of Georgia
“Skillfully traversing experimental music, media studies, existential literature, horror films, contemporary philosophy and digital culture, among other subjects, Greg Hainge carefully unpacks the topic of noise to expose its deep complexity. His project to map an ontology of this elusive and pertinent topic raises the level precisely on why noise matters, and finally lends to identifying noise as an expansive and vibrant materiality.”
Brandon Labelle, Professor, Bergen Academy Of Art And Design, Norway, And Author Of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture And Everyday Life And Background Noise: Perspectives On Sound Art
“In the wave of the current resurgence of both popular and scholarly interest in noise, Noise Matters blasts noise out of the realm of the purely sonic and into much stranger and more unexpected territory. From its opening manifesto on noise as essentially a question of the movement and vibration of both material and immaterial bodies, Hainge is just as at home dealing with the noise in Sartre’s Nausea as he is with the cinema of David Lynch or the noise music of Merzbow. In all of these spheres, controversial claims are made and arguments undertaken that present noise in terms and genealogies other than the cliches about modernist noise that many of both its proponents and detractors would have us believe, ultimately constituting a form of vital noise in, and in relation to, contemporary noise studies and surrounding fields.”
Dr Michael Goddard, University Of Salford, UK And Co-Editor Of Reverberations And Resonances Endorsement
“In Noise Matters, we are brought into a world of perceptual yet often hidden noise: noise arises, noise comes to be, noise infiltrates all. Hainge’s skill is to trace the filaments of noise into their material expressions, traversing film, fiction, philosophy, music, machinery, digital and analogue.”
Paul Hegarty, Author Of Noise/Music And Co-Author Of Beyond And Before: Progressive Rock Since The 1960s Endorsement
This excellent book is an important contribution to our understanding of Céline’s writing from a psychoanalytic perspective. Céline’s concern with madness in his writing is one of the major features of his work, and one which has been consistently recognised by his critics. In fact, Céline’s “madness” takes two forms, one clinical and covering a wide range of psychological symptoms, and the other aesthetic and stylistic, operating in the domain of hallucination and dream and often expressed through the means of “délire”.
His professional interest in psychology is well-documented. The correspondence with Cillie Pam in the 1930s, following his visit to Vienna in 1933, when he met a number of Viennese (and Jewish) psychoanalysts, demonstrates an above average knowledge of Freud’s work and refers specifically to the essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, of 1916. At the same time, by 1936 and the publication of Bagatelles pour un massacre, Céline, through his narrator Ferdinand, is at pains to distance himself from Freud and invokes instead a non-Freudian interpretation of dreams, embodied in Léon Daudet’s Le Rêve éveillé, of 1926.
Similarly, in Céline’s fiction the interest in psychological abnormality is present right from the beginning. In the long essay La Quinine en thérapeutique, of 1926, Dr Destouches recounts the strange case of the obsessive and Molièresque Dr Bazire, who is so convinced of the healing properties of quinine that, when it fails to effect an immediate cure on his own ailment, proceeds to increase the dose until he dies. Similarly, Céline’s doctoral thesis on Semmelweis fictionalises the career of the Hungarian scientist, signified by the inversion of the name Ignace-Fulop to Philippe-Ignace, by turning him, literally, into a madman. This concern with abnormal psychology continues into the fiction signed under the name of Céline: Voyage au bout de la nuit can not merely be interpreted as a dream and hallucination, it deploys a first-person narrator who spends much of his time, literally, delirious: from the light-headedness on the café terrace which opens the novel, through the literal nervous collapse in Paris during the War, to the fever in the African jungle and the hallucinatory crossing of the Atlantic on a slave-galley. Much more obviously Freudian in inspiration, Mort à crédit is a chronicle of madness: the neurotic Auguste, the fanciful Courtial des Pereires, the despairing Nora, the retarded child Jonkind, and, finally, the narrator Ferdinand himself, whose response to the misery of his family-life and economic situation is autism. This classic psychoanalytical tale ends significantly enough with a classic nervous collapse and a retreat into non-being, or back to the womb, under Oncle Edouard’s pile of ‘pardessus’. That this is no resolution is conveyed by the madness and delirium still tracking the mature narrator. Finally, from Bagatelles pour un massacre onwards explores the use of a deranged first-person narrator whose madness is both exculpatory and blindingly insightful.
Unsurprisingly, Céline’s critics have paid considerable attention to this body of psychological material at the heart of his writing. As early as 1971, Albert Chesneau, in Psychocritique de Céline, saw Céline’s work as highly susceptible to analysis on the lines of Charles Maurron. Similarly, Nicole Debrie, Willy Szafran, Henri Godard and Marie-Christine Bellosta have explored in considerable detail Céline’s debt to Freud in particular and psychology in general.
A psychological or, indeed, psychoanalytical, approach to Céline’s work presents problems, however. In the first place, most psychological studies of Céline have tended at some time to be backed into a biographical or autobiographical interpretation, as if the neuroses portrayed and worked out in the novels could only stem from a reality grounded in biography. Here, the letters from Céline to Joseph Garcin are highly revealing: not only do they confirm his extensive knowledge of Freud, but they also an exclusively writerly relish for pastiching the 1930s vogue for psychoanalytical fiction. Not that this should be taken totally seriously—no more so that his claims that Voyage was a merely a response to fashionable First World War fiction—but it does indicate that the gallery of psychological victims in Mort à crédit, along with the neurotic, and often mad, narrator, in full “délire”, from Bagatelles onwards is the result of conscious artifice and not emotional momentum.
Similarly, psychological studies of Céline have rarely succeeded in integrating the psychological features of the work to is socio-economic concerns. Mort à crédit, with its acute awareness of the importance of gold and its extensive reflection of the life of petit-bourgeois turn-of-the-century Paris, is one of France’s major historical novels. And that historical dimension is intimately connected to the neurosis of its characters and the autism of its child-narrator and the delirium of his mature counterpart. In this respect, Ferdinand must be seen as literally and metaphorically schizophrenic.
Here, and it is the great merit of this book, the work of Deleuze and Guattari provides a compelling framework for the analysis of Céline’s writing, in that it enables the psychological, the socio-economic and, above all, the stylistic, to be fully integrated into one reading. Dr Hainge, with meticulous care and highly intelligent insight, takes us closer than we have ever been before to the psychological centre of Céline’s work.
Appraisal by Professor Michael Tilby, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge:
In this illuminating study, Hainge demonstrates that Céline's post-war novels are not to be explained in terms of pathological obsessions redeemed by the brilliance of the author's stylistic innovations. With the aid of an approach derived from the anti-interpretative practice of Deleuze and Guattari, he makes a compelling case for seeing the later Céline as the lucid author of a 'schizophrenic' text, concerned to monitor the success or failure of his own creative strategies. This is a major contribution to our understanding of a difficult, and frequently misunderstood, writer.
Series description: ex:centrics. A series of books on contemporary art and music examining people, practices and movements from the space in-between, neither mainstream nor underground. Providing a space to examine ex:centric expressions that have transformed their field of cultural production yet eluded the scholarly and popular attention they deserve, the series seeks to redress this gap and consider works that led the way whilst staying under the radar, that sit on the periphery yet point towards the centre. Works published in this series explore the sonic and extend beyond it to critically assess how sound's capacity to transgress borders can be understood as itself an ex:centric practice. The series is thus designed to listen to the ways that cultural production can transform our ways of thinking about what takes place at the centre or extreme margins, on either side of the ex:centric.