Comparative Epistemology of Suspicion: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and the Human Sciences

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 649-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Strowick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
The Self ◽  
Identification System ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Close Interrelationship

ArgumentIn calling psychoanalysis a “school of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970, 32), Ricoeur marks at once its use in a disposition characteristic of modernity: the disposition of suspicion. Modernity gives rise to various forms of suspicion, to modern forms of ressentiment and practices of disciplining oneself (the suspicion of oneself) as well as to an epistemology of suspicion. In this essay, I shall analyze the epistemological function of suspicion – which as the “paradigm of clues” (Ginzburg 1988) becomes the leading paradigm of the human sciences in the last third of the nineteenth century – and its close interrelationship with the techniques of power. As I shall demonstrate through a comparative reading of psychoanalytical, literary, and criminological texts, the modern production of knowledge in the human sciences cannot be separated from the modern “micro-physics of power,” which for Foucault was established in the eighteenth century, and the technologies of the self. I shall situate the paradigm of clues within the framework of the modern disposition of suspicion in order to combine the epistemological reflections with an analysis of cultural history. Thus I will first examine the paradigm of clues from the perspectives of cultural theory (Foucault and Nietzsche) and semiotics (Peirce), in order to illuminate the structural unreliability of the episteme as well as the way it is closely linked to the techniques of power. In what follows, I will apply this view to Bertillon's photographic identification system, the psychoanalytical concept of the trace, and Kafka's short story The Burrow.

Genius in France

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
History Of

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.

“Was There Not Reason to Doubt?”:Wielandand Its Secular Age

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 735-756
Author(s):  
Christine Hedlin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Hearing Voices ◽  
Medical Discourses ◽  
American Cultural History ◽  
Secular Age ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines Charles Brockden Brown'sWieland, or The Transformation(1798) as engaging with the distinctive “secular age” of the early republic, a volatile moment in American cultural history when such experiences as having visions and hearing voices, both prevalent in the novel, drew an array of religious and medical explanations. Drawing upon the work of theorists of new secular studies, I argue that the doubts of the novel's narrator Clara regarding who or what is responsible for her family's undoing signal the difficulty of storytelling in an age of spiritual and intellectual uncertainty. By thus reading Clara's indeterminacy as a reaction to the contrapuntal religious and medical discourses of the early republic, my essay offers new insight into the significance of her rhetorically strained, inconclusive attempt at rendering a didactic narrative. Rather than offering Clara merely as a negative example for readers – a victim of her own imperfect discipline, as she herself assesses – Brown utilizes her self-proclaimed failure to ironize the self-assuredness of eighteenth-century didactic novels in an age rife with doubt.

Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Scottish History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew D. C. Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Future Study ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Folk Tales ◽  
Literary Structure ◽  
Early Christian

Approaching the Gospel according to Mark as unfinished notes, the author argues that literary critics do not “find” nuanced literary structure in the text. They produce it—not unlike what the Gospel according to Matthew does with the Gospel according to Mark. The author proposes a new methodological framework for future study of early Christian gospels. He points to an example from cultural history (Robert Darnton’s work on eighteenth-century French folk tales) and to possible projects in the digital humanities in order to begin to think about how to reconceptualize the process of gospel writing.

Back from the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Positive Affect ◽  
Professional Women ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ivy League ◽  
Younger Women ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Successful Career ◽  
Family Balance ◽  
The Future ◽  
Work Family

Chapter 4 examines two well-trafficked mommy blogs written by Ivy League–educated professional women with children. Reading these blogs as part of the larger neoliberal feminist turn, the chapter demonstrates how neoliberal feminism is currently interpellating middle-aged women differently from their younger counterparts. If younger women are exhorted to sequence their lives in order to ensure a happy work-family balance in the future, for older feminist subjects—those who already have children and a successful career—notions of happiness have expanded to include the normative demand to live in the present as fully and as positively as possible. The turn from a future-oriented perspective to “the here and now” reveals how different temporalities operate as part of the technologies of the self within contemporary neoliberal feminism. This chapter thus demonstrates how positive affect is the mode through which technologies of the self-direct subjects toward certain temporal horizons.

Between History and Nature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Hermeneutic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Way

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.

scholarly journals Snaking into the Gothic: Serpentine Sensuousness in Lewis and Coleridge

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Jeremy Chow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
The Erotic ◽  
Gothic Studies

This essay charts the ways late-eighteenth-century Gothic authors repurpose natural histories of snakes to explore how reptile-human encounters are harbingers of queer formations of gender, sexuality, and empire. By looking to M.G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) and his understudied short story “The Anaconda” (1808), as well as S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel (1797–1800), I centre the last five years of the eighteenth century to apprehend the interwoven nature of Gothic prose, poetry, and popular natural histories as they pertain to reptile knowledge and representations. Whereas Lewis’s short story positions the orientalised anaconda to upheave notions of empire, gender, and romance, his novel invokes the snake to signal the effusion of graphic eroticisms. Coleridge, in turn, invokes the snake-human interspecies connection to imagine female, homoerotic possibilities and foreclosures. Plaiting eighteenth-century animal studies, queer studies, and Gothic studies, this essay offers a queer eco-Gothic reading of the violating, erotic powers of snakes in their placement alongside human interlocutors. I thus recalibrate eighteenth-century animal studies to focus not on warm-blooded mammals, but on cold-blooded reptiles and the erotic effusions they afford within the Gothic imaginary that repeatedly conjures them, as I show, with queer interspecies effects.

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