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List of contents
1. 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
About the author
Oscar Jansson teaches Comparative Literature at Lund University. He is the author of Graham Greene and the Conditions of 20th Century Literature and editor of Translating Sex & Gender. His work on literature and media, ranging from the aesthetics of national romanticism to affective modes of satire in contemporary fiction, regularly appears in publications such as Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap, Passage, and Canadian Review of Comparative Literature.David LaRocca, Ph.D., is the author or contributing editor of seventeen books, including several from Bloomsbury. He edited Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003) and Metacinema (2021). Earlier edited volumes are devoted to the philosophy of documentary film, war films, and the cinema of Charlie Kaufman. He has taught philosophy, rhetoric, and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ithaca College, the New York Public Library, the School of Visual Arts, the State University of New York at Cortland, and Vanderbilt University. He served as Harvard University’s Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom and, like Cavell before him, was honored with the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. www.DavidLaRocca.org
Summary
The 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, media, cinema, politics, painting, theatre, and the performing arts with a range of indispensable excerpts from canonical texts -- by notable, field-defining thinkers such as Apter, Cassin, Cavell, Derrida, Irigaray, Malabou, and Nancy, among others -- the volume presents “the Geschlecht complex” as a condition to become aware of, and in turn, to companionably underwrite any interpretive endeavor.
Historically grounded, yet attuned to the particularities of the present, the Geschlecht complex becomes an invaluable mode for thinking and theorizing while ensconced in the urgent immediacy of pressing concerns, and poised for the inevitable complexities of categorial naming and genre discernment that await in the so often inscrutable, translation-resistant twenty-first century.
Foreword
A diverse set of scholars use the concept of Geschlecht - denoting gender, genre, kinship, kind, species, and more - to explores questions of category, naming, and difference from a transdisciplinary framework.
Additional text
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.
