Description
Book SynopsisThe polysemous German word
Geschlecht -- denoting gender, genre, kind, kinship, species, race, and somehow also more -- exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the translational, transdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational structures of the contemporary humanities: What happens when texts, objects, practices, and concepts are transferred or displaced from one language, tradition, temporality, or form to another? What is readily transposed, what resists relocation, and what precipitate emerges as distorted or new? Drawing on Barbara Cassin''s transformative remarks on untranslatability, and the activity of philosophizing in languages, scholars contributing to
The Geschlecht Complex examine these and other durable queries concerning the ontological powers of naming, and do so in the light of recent artistic practices, theoretical innovations, and philosophical incitements. Combining detailed case studies of concrete category problems in literature, philosophy,
Trade ReviewAs someone who has followed untranslatability for many years, it is with great pleasure that Oscar Jansson and David LaRocca have brought this theme to a point of philosophical sophistication in
The Geschlecht Complex—a brilliant, bold, and eccentric work. [...]themselves to a single (but impossibly complex) German word, a range of scholars from different fields of inquiry and analysis have nonetheless produced a collection that signals a new maturity in the approach to untranslatability. In that sense, it may (hopefully) be the first of many such works. This is a collection that bravely attempts to overcome the constraints of traditional scholarship in the hope of generating work that lives up to Apter and Cassin’s invocations to ‘philosophize with languages’. The very form of the book itself challenges and expands a series of preconceptions on this topic. It is a brave, well-rounded, and seismically significant publication insofar as it exercises what previous scholars have only prescribed and envisioned. * Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Review *
Bristling with intellectual energy,
The Geschlecht Complex brings together a number of brilliantly original essays and a carefully curated sample of theoretical excerpts in its exploration of the resonances and affordances of a singularly untranslatable notion.
The Geschlecht Complex is many things: it is both syllabus and seminar, both a joyful intellectual exchange and a virtuoso homage to the examples of such thinkers/readers as Cassin, Cavell, Apter, and Derrida. Most of all, it is an exuberant performance of the key inspiration driving the thinking of the untranslatable: the conviction that the untranslatable is at once generated and redeemed by passionate ventures of translation-across genres, media, bodies, languages, and disciplines. In all these transpositions, this volume succeeds marvelously. * Pieter Vermeulen, Associate Professor of American and Comparative Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium *
Geschlecht by any other name: that multifarious and ultimately untranslatable German word typifying in this volume a complexity and a syndrome alike -- its cultural semantics both vertical for
generational kindred and horizontal for
genre or
kind; lineage on the one hand, typology on the other; now general species or
genus, now specified
gender. With this book’s erudite roundtable, we are invited to the second, collectively-edited installment of a productive -- make that generative -- seminar once convened to rethink the ramifications of such irresolvable inner difference: less as a definitional crux than as a blocked crossing, where impasse becomes surplus when confronted at the disciplinary interface of philology and philosophy, rhetoric and ontology. Giving new reach to
trans-theory, the performative yield of category-hesitation in these essays is abundant, subtle, and bracing. * Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, and author of The Deed of Reading: Literature * Writing * Language * Philosophy *
The Geschlecht Complex is a rare and undoubtedly important book in that it treats categorization as
both problem and necessity for the production of knowledge. Indeed, utilizing and developing the notion of the ‘uncategorizable’ as an analytical tool, it collects a multitude of contemporary problems into a stereoscopic perspective (albeit in a non-unitary manner and necessarily hesitant of its own limits) on the age-old aesthetic problem of the sublime and the monstrous -- and furthermore, on the ontological consequences of those seemingly impossible categories. * Isak Hyltén-Cavallius, Chief Editor, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap/Swedish Journal of Literary Studies, Lund University, Sweden, and Associate Professor of Literary Studies. Linnæus University, Växjö, Sweden *
Table of Contents1. Contending with Untranslatable Categories; or, Inducing the Nervous Condition of the
Geschlecht Complex (
Oscar Jansson, Lund University, Sweden, and David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA) Appendix I: Unfinished Definitions (
Jansson/LaRocca) Apter | Cassin | Cavell | Crépon 2. Antitheatricality as Critical Idiom (
Caro Pirri, University of Pittsburgh, USA) 3. The Cruel Beast: Settler Sovereignty and the Crisis of American Zoopolitics (
Brian W. Nail, Florida State College at Jacksonville, USA) 4. Between the Body and Language: Narratives of the Moving Subject in Okwui Okpokwasili’s
Bronx Gothic (
Lauren DiGiulio, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) Appendix II: Indefiniteness,
Geschlechtlosigkeit, Undoing (
Jansson/LaRocca) Butler | Cassin | Crépon | David-Ménard | Derrida | Deutscher | Heller-Roazen | Irigaray | Malabou | Nancy | Preciado | Sandford | Spillers | Weheliye 5. Collapsing the Gender/Genre Distinction: On Transgressions of Category in Woolf’s
Orlando (
Oscar Jansson, Lund University, Sweden) 6. Gazing at the Untranslatable Subject: From Velázquez’s
Las Meninas to Ellison’s
Invisible Man (
Richard Hajarizadeh, SUNY Binghamton, USA) 7. From Lectiocentrism to Gramophonology: Listening to Cinema and Writing Sound Criticism (
David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA) Appendix III: Genre Unlimited/Genre Ungenred (
Jansson/LaRocca) Apter | Barthes | Cavell | Chartier | Crimmins | Croce | Derrida | Jauss | Wells Afterword: Trans-Ontology and the
Geschlecht Complex (
Emily Apter, New York University, USA)
Bibliography Acknowledgments Contributors Index
