A. McKenna

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Faulkner's Novels Past and PresentAndrew J. McKenna (bio)This article contains instances of the N-word. The Editor, Michigan State University Press, and Michigan State University do not condone the use of this word and only after careful consideration have we reprinted it. In this case, the word appears in the context of works by Faulkner.When I first came East I kept thinking You've got to remember to think of some of them as coloured people not niggers, … I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, and leave them alone. That was when I realized that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.—Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury ([1929] 2019, 45)A black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia.—W. E. B. Du Bois ([1940] 1992, 153)When William Faulkner memorably stated, "the past is not dead, it's not even past," he was not reaching out for a place in the world-historical pantheon of aphoristic wisdom; he wasn't thinking about culture and history in general. A person of his own time and place, he was thinking about his experience in his own homeland, the deep South of his native [End Page 39] Mississippi, with its cherished myth of a Lost Cause that ennobled the effort to tear our country apart over slavery, and that subsequently enabled Jim Crow legislation, spawned the KKK, and sanctioned a century of lynching and burning. There has been an uptick of attention to Faulkner owing to Carl Rollyson's recent two-volume biography (2020) and, especially for my purposes, Michael Gorra's The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (2020), which focuses on the centrality of that cataclysm in his creative imagination and his historical vision.On more than one occasion Faulkner himself was emphatic in his own ambivalence toward "his native land," as in this self-description: "He was born of it and his bones will sleep in it; loving it even while hating some of it … the intolerance and injustice; the lynching of negroes not for the crimes they committed but because their skins were black" (in Blotner 2005, 354). Gorra (2020) argues that this very ambivalence is a generative resource for the author's greatest achievements, quoting Yeats's notorious dictum, "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry" (346). This can remind us of the notorious "crucible of doubt" out of which Dostoevsky allegedly forged his fiction. The Russian novelist is named (Blotner 2005, 718) as among seven of Faulkner's "masters" in the literary education of this omnivorous autodidact, with the others being Melville, Conrad, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, and Cervantes. With Dostoevsky especially he shares an admixture of horror and benign good humor. On occasion Faulkner was classed as an author of Southern Gothic, a label also applied to Flannery O'Connor, who, with Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, counts among his greatest literary progeny. A more capacious designation might rank him with masters of the grotesque, as Mikhail Bakhtin has explored this anomalous category in his writings on Rabelais and Dostoevsky.Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) begins and ends on a humorous note, as we follow the quest of the guileless Lena Grove for the father of her unborn child. She has concluded from her "endless care of other children" in her brother's household, "'I reckon that's why I got one so quick myself'" (3); the novel closes with her newborn infant in her arms in her now aimless trek, marveling, "My, my. A body does get around: here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee" (480).Lena's peregrinations bookend the story of Joe Christmas, so named because he was born on that day and who, we find later in the narrative, was snatched away by his religiously fanatical grandfather to be placed in an orphanage, then snatched away again to be placed...

Cette étude a l'ambition de couvrir à la fois la réception et l'influence des Pensées de Pascal jusqu'en 1734. Elle se fonde sur une analyse des influences philosophiques à l'uvre dans la composition même de l'uvre de Pascal, concluant à la forte influence de Gassendi sur la conception pascalienne du libertinage. Cette orientation de l'apologie est cependant contrariée par le fait que les Pensées sont éditées en 1670 par les théologiens cartésiens de Port-Royal, Arnauld et Nicole. Au-delà de la forte influence des Pensées sur les Essais de morale de Nicole, les premières années de la réception sont marquées par la réfutation implicite contenue dans les uvres de Malebranche, de sorte qu'on observe la rivalité de deux conceptions de l'apologétique à cette époque: l'une, celle de Pascal, historique, vise à démontrer l'authenticité de la révélation du Dieu d'Abraham, d'Isaac et de Jacob par le témoignage de l'Ecriture Sainte; l'autre, malebranchiste, se base sur l'évidence des 'preuves de simple vue' et démontre l'existence de celui que Pascal avait désigné comme le 'Dieu des philosophes'. Or, jamais les apologistes ne renonceront aux preuves 'naturelles' et s'enfermeront dans le piège dénoncé par Pascal: ils célèbrent le triomphe du rationalisme chrétien et se font défenseurs du déisme. Lorsque Bayle met en évidence l'échec du rationalisme théologique, les philosophes clandestins auront beau jeu de transformer le rationalisme malebranchiste en rationalisme antichrétien.

Jacques Derrida’s critique of philosophical origins, in his essay on Plato and elsewhere, unveils a sacrificial dynamic that René Girard hypothesizes as the origin of human culture. Girard’s latest book, Achever Clausewitz, applies his mimetic theory to history: the Prussian general’s analysis of increasingly violent «reciprocal action» in modern, post-revolutionary warfare exposes the mimetic principle of lethally violent doubles. This «trend to extremes» works to the dissolution of institutions – national sovereignty, international law, politics, war itself – that Derrida explores in Voyous, his book-length essay on terrorism. Both authors see the world of globalized commerce and the globalized terrorism that goes with it as enmeshed in violent undifferentiation. Girard’s historically grounded work supplies a narrative line to Derrida’s structural analyses. Derrida’s call for an ever more vigorous deconstructive rationality as a solution is symptomatic of philosophy’s blindness to the interactive crescendos of human violence that is unveiled in Girard’s religious anthropology.