Carrie Giunta

This essay revisits a debate about literary fiction’s ability to depict the consequences of climate change. Philosopher McKenzie Wark’s 2017 essay, ‘On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene’, offers one of many critiques of climate fiction, such as Amitav Ghosh’s influential book, The Great Derangement. But while Ghosh sees a shortcoming in contemporary novels in their lack of representation of major climate events, Wark emphasises the importance of collective action, conversation, and connection, beyond the limits of literature. Since Wark’s intervention, the global School Strike for Climate in 2019 and 2020 brought more participatory post-literary forms to represent climate change. Jean- Luc Nancy’s theory of participation, that there is no mimesis without participation (methexis), sees a tense relation between the two rather than an opposition or conflict. I argue that Wark, by not undervaluing participation, disrupts a hierarchy that privileges the imitator at the expense of the imitation. To explore this relation, I consider how the slogan ‘there is no Planet B’ forms a snapshot of our twenty- first-century mimetic condition, from which no imitative representation will save us. Can Wark expand the vision of another relational kind of femininity in her later writing to support the demand to take part in transformational action against climate catastrophe, beyond mimetic representation carried in the form of the novel?

In this thesis, I use a close reading of the silent films of Charlie Chaplin to examine a question of listening posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable” (Nancy 2007:1)? Drawing on the work of Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, I consider a claim that philosophy has failed to address the topic of listening because a logocentric tradition claims speech as primary. In response to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, Nancy complicates the problem of listening by distinguishing between l’écoute and l’entente. L’écoute is an attending to and answering the demand of the other and l’entente is an understanding directed inward toward a subject. Nancy could deconstruct an undervalued position of l’écoute, making listening essential to speech. I argue, Nancy rather asks what kind of listening philosophy is capable of. To examine this question, I focus on the peculiarly dialogical figure derived from Chaplin that communicates meaning without using speech. This discussion illustrates how Chaplin, in the role of a silent figure, listens to himself (il s’écoute) as other. Chaplin’s listening is Nancean resonance, a movement in which a subject refers back to itself as another subject, in constant motion of spatial and temporal non-presence. For Nancy, listening is a self’s relationship to itself, but without immediate self-presence. Moving in resonance, Chaplin makes the subject as other as he refers back to himself as other. I argue that Chaplin, through silent dialogue with himself by way of the other, makes his listening listened to. Chaplin refused to make his character speak because he believed speech would change the way in which his work would be listened to. In this way, Chaplin makes people laugh by making himself understood (se fait entendre) as he makes himself listened to (se fait écouter). In answer to Nancy’s question, I conclude philosophy is capable of meeting the demand of listening as both l’entente and l’écoute when it listens as Chaplin listens.

"In an exciting range of original responses to Nancy's work, these 12 essays reanimate the dialogue between interdisciplinary scholars and practicing artists that originally gave birth to visual culture as a field of study. A new translation of Nancy's essay, 'The Image: Mimesis and Methexis', reveals how Nancy's work informs, challenges and inspires our encounters with visual culture. Jean-Luc Nancy is one of the most original and compelling of those contemporary political and ethical philosophers who, like Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou, have turned in recent works towards aesthetics and visual art. Nancy's challenging and inspiring writings on painting, film, photography, video and contemporary visual art have informed the work of scholars of visual culture and aesthetic theory as well as artists, filmmakers and curators"--Provided by publisher.