Eleanor Kaufman

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Klossowski, Deleuze, and OrthodoxyEleanor Kaufman (bio)Among the many strange and wonderful things to be found there, Pierre Klossowski's oeuvre is a preeminent illustration of what divides univocity and equivocity and therefore serves as one of the twentieth century's most instructive models for thinking the complexity of the dialectic. Univocity and equivocity are significant both in their roots in Scholastic philosophy, as the idea that Being is expressed in either one or several senses, and as belonging to a longstanding framework that helps demarcate the differences, nuanced yet significant, among members of the extraordinary generation of French intellectuals of which Klossowski was a part. Thus, these terms, apart from their theological and philosophical import, will serve as a heuristic for renarrating points of filiation and divergence among a series of prominent French thinkers, primarily Bataille, Klossowski, and Deleuze, but also extending backward to Sartre and forward to Badiou to frame the series. I will approach this in segmented fashion, first opposing Bataille's dialectic of transgression to Klossowski's more univocal method of disjunctive synthesis. When juxtaposed with Deleuze's Spinozist affirmation of univocity, however, Klossowski would seem to be more on the side of the equivocal. Whereas Deleuze criticizes the realm between the univocal and the equivocal as the lukewarm space of the analogical, my contention is that this middle realm allows for a space of movement and reversal that escapes the pitfalls Deleuze locates in the dialectic, and does so without a strict adherence to Spinozist univocity. Whereas Bataille and Deleuze remain closer to Klossowski in the tenor of their thought, I will nonetheless suggest in conclusion that Sartre and Badiou are actually closer to Klossowski on a formal level, in that each poses a similarly analogical challenge to the thought of the dialectic.For many reasons Bataille and Klossowski can be paired together. They were contemporaries, both born around the turn of the century, both writing in a variety of literary and philosophical genres, including pornographic or semi-pornographic fiction, and working outside the academy. Both wrote studies of Nietzsche, of Sade, and radical economic treatises. They were friends and fellow members in the late 1930s of the College of Sociology, which was modeled after a secret society, the members taking great interest in such topics as sacrifice and headlessness. Bataille and Klossowski wrote about each other. Both were at different points obsessed with Roman Catholicism, both at different points prepared to enter monastic orders, both in different fashions fell away. As might easily be imagined, their fiction is an outrageous mixture of the sacred and the profane, including sexual encounters and other desecrations staged at church alters and the like. Both work in that realm where pornography and theology come together. Yet while the more familiar Bataille uses pornography toward transgressive aims, the lesser-known Klossowski uses a more nuanced and interesting mechanism of boredom to elaborate an intrinsically disjunctive structure.Even boredom, for Bataille, partakes of the transgressive. In his novella The Story of the Eye, the narrator describes offhandedly how he and his companion Simone have just found their friend Marcelle's body. She has hung herself. The narrator and Simone [End Page 47] take the body down and have sex for the first time next to it. Then the narrator describes the boredom that ensues even in the face of death: "We were perfectly calm, all three of us, and that was the most hopeless part of it. Any boredom in the world is linked, for me, to that moment and, above all, to an obstacle as ridiculous as death. But that won't prevent me from thinking back to that time with no revulsion and even with a sense of complicity. Basically, the lack of excitement made everything far more absurd, and thus Marcelle was closer to me dead than in her lifetime, inasmuch as absurd existence, so I imagine, has all the prerogatives" [59–60]. This is actually an unusually meditative moment in Bataille's story of murder, priests, bullfights, and constant sex.1 Here his narrator links boredom to death, and to a reflection on the absurd boundary between life and death. But by commenting on boredom...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why the Family is Beautiful (Lacan Against Badiou)Eleanor Kaufman (bio)The theory of ethics that can be distilled from the work of Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou bears no resemblance to many commonly received notions of the ethical, especially any that would link ethics to a system of morality. In fact, ethics is not necessarily the central concept in their work, even in Lacan's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis or Badiou's recent Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. If anything, it is defined vicariously and in relation to other more central concepts, such as the workings of desire for Lacan and the fidelity to an event—or truth-process—for Badiou. Nonetheless, an examination of the network of concepts held together under the umbrella of the ethical allows for a sharp distinction between the work of Lacan and Badiou, one that Badiou—himself avowedly indebted to Lacan—is hesitant to make. Where Lacan elevates the beautiful over the good in his reading of Sophocles's Antigone, Badiou elevates the truth-process over the evil betrayal of such an event, drawing on examples ranging from National Socialism to the love relation between two people. A truth-process is a situation-specific adherence, or fidelity, to the revolutionary potential of an event that may take place in one of the four realms of politics, art, science, and love. Perhaps Badiou's best example of a truth-process—what I will also refer to as fidelity to an event—is one not described in the text under consideration here: the apostle Paul's proclamation of and fierce loyalty to the event of Christ's resurrection. It is in the particular form in which the ethical fidelity to a truth-process may be hard to distinguish from evil that I will take issue with Badiou, for both his political examples and his evocation of love as one of four conduits to a truth-process reflect a difficult inflexibility in his extraordinarily lucid and provocative system. Lacan, on the other hand, uses Antigone's strange family values to suggest a more flexible model of ethics, one that is focused on the encounter with the inhuman and the fragile boundary between life and death.Lacan's most sustained discussion of ethics occurs in his seminal Seminar Seven from 1959-60, entitled The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.1 Not only does this seminar register a gradual shift from an earlier emphasis on desire to a later focus on the real and the drive, but it is also a crucial articulation of what might seem for some to be an oxymoronic conjunction—psychoanalysis and ethics. Such a conjunction, as opposed to a Sartrean or Levinasian model that would situate ethics in relation to the Other,2 takes as its [End Page 135] touchstone Freud's stinging critique in Civilization and Its Discontents of the biblical injunction to love the neighbor as oneself. Here it is not merely a question of understanding why the neighbor may be equally an object of hatred, but of understanding how contradictory sentiments are also to be found at the heart of the self, and hence why a viable system of ethics must take this into consideration.3 In other words, ethics is not to be thought primarily as a relation to the other so much as a nonrelation to the self.4 Thus, when Lacan opposes the good to the beautiful, it is precisely the relational aspect of the good that he denigrates.Lacan links the good to the dialectic and to the power to deprive others, situating it squarely in the realm of morality. The beautiful, by contrast, marks a space of nonrelation where it is not so much a matter of two distinct selves but rather of a single self whose desire is not its own. In Seminar Six from the previous year, Lacan analyzes Hamlet and suggests that the reason Hamlet does not kill Claudius is that he is traversed by his mother's desire. He emphasizes that Hamlet's desire is "the desire not for his mother, but of his mother."5 Between Seminars Six and Seven, Lacan shifts his focus from desire to ethics, from...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Falling From the Sky: Trauma in Perec’s W and Caruth’s Unclaimed ExperienceEleanor Kaufman (bio)1 Fear of FallingIt is not surprising to find a link between trauma and falling in an entire strain of postwar literature. It is arguably the case that, in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, a new and more aerial form of spatial perception came into prominence, one in which something or someone might reasonably be expected to fall out of the sky. Such a form of perception, vertical rather than horizontal in its orientation, is often experienced as an uneasiness directed at falling in both its physical and its metaphysical senses. That is, there is both a literal fear of falling from a height and a spiritual angst about falling, generally through no agency of one’s own, from one station in life to another.Within the postwar French tradition, 1 the conjunction of these two forms of falling is nowhere better articulated than in Georges Perec’s semi-autobiographical novel W or the Memory of Childhood. W alternates chapter by chapter between two different forms of writing: one a fantastical narrative about the faraway island of W, in which a robust society of athletes devote their lives to an Olympic ideal of sport, and which is organized by a system that first appears like a rational utopia but by the novel’s end devolves into a terrifying concentrationary universe; the other a non-narrative, truncated, and elliptical set of references to Perec’s own Jewish wartime childhood (Perec’s father died fighting for France in 1940; his mother died after being deported to Auschwitz in early 1943; in 1942, his mother placed the young Perec, aged six, on a Red Cross convoy headed toward the French Free Zone). In the autobiographical section of W, Perec gives several versions of his departure from his mother. In what follows are two of these versions, followed by Perec’s subsequent analysis of this memory.Of particular interest is the way that images of falling or suspension, here in the form of the parachute, punctuate this memory and take on their meaning precisely at the later [End Page 44] moment when Perec finds himself parachuting from the sky.The only surviving memory of my mother is the day she took me to the Gare de Lyon, which is where I left for Villard-de-Lans in a Red Cross convoy: though I have no broken bones, I wear my arm in a sling. My mother buys me a comic entitled Charlie and the Parachute: on the illustrated cover, the parachute’s rigging lines are no other than Charlie’s trouser braces.[26]My mother took me to the Gare de Lyon. I was six. She entrusted me to a Red Cross convoy leaving for Grenoble, in the free zone. She bought me a magazine, an issue of Charlie, with a cover showing Charlie Chaplin, with his walking stick, his hat, his shoes and his little mustache, doing a parachute jump. The parachute is attached to Charlie by his trouser braces.[54]A triple trait runs through this memory: parachute, sling, truss: it involves suspension, support, prosthesis almost. In order to be, you had to be propped. Sixteen years later, in 1958, when the haphazard fate of military service made me into a short-lived parachutist, I was able to read, at the very instant of jumping, one of the decoded texts of that memory: I was thrown into the void; all the threads were broken; I was falling, alone and without support. The parachute opened. The canopy unfurled, a fragile and firm suspense before the controlled descent.[55, translation modified]These two memories of Perec’s departure from his mother, as well as the third decoded reading dating from 1958, might be viewed together as the story of a trauma that, with characteristic belatedness, is only readable after the fact. Moreover, the motif of falling, in this instance figured by the recurrence of the parachute, provides the key to deciphering the memory of the trauma. The last—and lasting—memory of the mother is that of her buying Perec...

The laudatory essay, in which one author praises the work of another, is frequently characterized as an unimportant, even uncritical mode of writing. But as Eleanor Kaufman argues in The Delirium of Praise, this mode of exchange is serious and substantial enough to merit scholarly attention. By not conforming to standard practices of critical discourse, laudatory essays give new status to supposedly inferior forms of communication and states of being -- including chatter, silence, sickness, imbalance, and absence of work -- and emphasize affective states or emotions such as joy, friendship, and longing. The Delirium of Praise examines a group of five twentieth-century French intellectuals -- Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Klossowski -- and their laudatory essays about each other. Structured as a circular series of exchanges, the book examines pairings of two thinkers with respect to a given theme. The exchange between Bataille and Blanchot takes up the themes of chatter and silence with regard to the novelist Louis-René des Foróts; the Blanchot-Foucault exchange explores friendship and impersonality through the lens of Jacques Derrida; the Foucault-Deleuze exchange considers "absence of work" ( désoeuvrement) and the obscure French philosopher Jacques Martin; the Deleuze-Klossowski exchange revolves around the question of the sick body and the person of Nietzsche; and the final exchange between Klossowski and Bataille focuses on imbalanced economies and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Where the praise is most excessive, approaching delirium, Kaufman locates a powerful thought-energy that pushes the laudatory essay to its limits. In her conclusion, she presents this unique mode of thought exchange as a form of intellectual hospitality. Kaufman uncovers a suspension of subjectivity, of personality, even of place and time, that is both articulated in the laudatory essays and enacted by them. Her examination of this neglected mode as practiced by five important French thinkers offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century intellectual history. -- Allan Stoekl.

This dissertation examines a group of five twentieth-century French intellectuals--Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Klossowski--and their laudatory writings about each other. It argues that such a mode of writing allows for a unique convergence of content and form. By not conforming to standard practices of critical discourse, these laudatory essays enable forms of communication and states of being that are often viewed as inferior to come to the forefront: these include chatter, silence, sickness, imbalance, and absence of work. ;The dissertation is structured as a circular series of exchanges between five different pairings of thinkers. The first pairing is Bataille-Blanchot, then Blanchot-Foucault, Foucault-Deleuze, Deleuze-Klossowski, and Klossowski-Bataille. Each pairing examines the exchanges between the two thinkers in question with respect to a given theme and in conjunction with a third party who comes to bear on the exchange. Thus, the Bataille-Blanchot exchange takes up the themes of chatter and silence with regard to the novelist Louis-Rene des Forets; the Blanchot-Foucault exchange explores friendship and impersonality through the lens of Jacques Derrida; the Foucault-Deleuze exchange is concerned with the absence of work and the obscure French philosopher Jacques Martin; the Deleuze-Klossowski exchange revolves around the question of the sick body and the person of Nietzsche; the final exchange between Klossowski and Bataille focuses on imbalanced economies and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. The conclusion, which presents this unique mode of thought exchange as a form of intellectual hospitality, underscores the many contradictions inherent in the practice of hospitality and draws out these contradictions rather than resolving them