Abstract
Parallels are discussed between the Biblical (Jewish and then Christian) use of ‘stumbling stone’ and Shklovsky’s thisworldly notion of estrangement – ‘making the stone stony.’ To Shklovsky’s esthetic salvation through estranged perception, Brecht adds value criteria from salvational politics, using, for example, in The Caucasian Chalk Circle a Marxist figuralism, which rationalizes the sensual body. However, estrangement as a formal device which doubts the present norms is ideologico-politically ambiguous: in the Brecht or Marxist wing it is ‘critical,’ but in other hands it may be ‘mythical’: Hamsun, Jünger, Pound, and the Iranian Ta’ziyeh play use it with a lay or religious proto-fascist horizon. The final section follows Timpanaro’s insistence on biological death as not fully reducible to politics in the usual sense, and juxtaposes stumbling, death, and creative eros as politics. In spite of Hegel’s insistence on death as a powerful negative, it is a blind spot in canonical Marxism. Even Ernst Bloch, positing hope as the central principle, does not fully engage with it, though I mention some initial useful leads from him, Brecht, and Jameson. We are left with the Freudian topology pitting eros against thanatos, and the essay closes on a discussion of Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress.
Works Cited
Auerbach, Erich. “Figura.” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1959. 11–76.Search in Google Scholar
Badiou, Alain. L’Hypothèse communiste. Fécamp: Éditions Lignes, 2009.Search in Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil, 1957. Search in Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1972–1983 [qtd. as GS]. Search in Google Scholar
The Bible. New Revised Standard Version. Ed. Bruce M. Metzger. 1989, bible.oremus.org. Accessed 1 Aug. 2017.Search in Google Scholar
Biblehub.com. Greek Concordances, biblehub.com. Accessed 1 Aug. 2017.Search in Google Scholar
Bloch, Ernst. “Entfremdung, Verfremdung: Alienation, Estrangement.” Brecht. Ed. Erika Munk. Trans. Anne Halley and Darko Suvin. New York: Bantam, 1972. 3–11.10.2307/1144598Search in Google Scholar
Bloch, Ernst. “Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse.” The Spirit of Utopia. Trans. Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. 233–78.10.1515/9780804778855-003Search in Google Scholar
Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1959.Search in Google Scholar
Bloch, Ernst, and Theodor W. Adorno. “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing.” Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Selected Essays. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 3–17, staff.washington.edu/schenold/chid390/readings/Bloch+Adorno-Something's%20Missing.pdf. Accessed 1 Aug. 2017.Search in Google Scholar
Boer, Roland. Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology. Leiden: Brill, 2007. 10.1163/ej.9789004161115.i-472Search in Google Scholar
Bourguière, André. “Le long voyage de L’Homme et la mort.” Communications 1 (2008): 49–70, cairn.info/revue-communications-2008-1-page-49.htm. Accessed 1 Aug. 2017. Search in Google Scholar
Brecht, Bertolt. Werke. Große kommentierte Frankfurter und Berliner Ausgabe. Berlin: Aufbau and Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988–2000 [qtd. as GFBA]. Search in Google Scholar
Bryan, Lindsay. “Vae mundo a scandalis.” Unpublished doctoral thesis. U of Toronto, 1998.Search in Google Scholar
Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon. London: Verso, 2012.Search in Google Scholar
Douzinas, Costas, and Slavoj Žižek, eds. The Idea of Communism. London: Verso, 2010. Search in Google Scholar
Erlich, Victor. Russian Formalism:History – Doctrine. New York: Mouton, 1955. Search in Google Scholar
Fortini, Franco. Saggi ed epigrammi. Ed. Luca Lenzini. Milano: Mondadori, 2003.Search in Google Scholar
Grene, Marjorie. The Knower and the Known. London: Faber & Faber, 1966. Search in Google Scholar
Guattari, Félix, and Antonio Negri. Communists Like Us. New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance. Trans. Michael Ryan. New York: Semiotext(e), 1990. Search in Google Scholar
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Sämtliche Werke: kritische Ausgabe. Vol. 2. Eds. Johannes Hoffmeister and Georg Lasson. Leipzig: Meiner, 1949. Search in Google Scholar
Hugo, de Sancto Victore. The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor. Trans. Jerome Taylor. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Search in Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. Search in Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of Time: the Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Search in Google Scholar
Marvell, Andrew. “To His Coy Mistress.” poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress. Accessed 1 Aug. 2017.10.1093/oseo/instance.00017818Search in Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. Vol. 1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke. Vol. 23. Berlin: Dietz, 1993. Search in Google Scholar
Morin, Edgar. L’homme et la mort dans l’histoire. Paris: Corréa, 1951. Search in Google Scholar
Mukařovský, Jan. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1970. 10.1080/17561310.2015.1049476Search in Google Scholar
Nancy, Jean-Luc. La Communauté désoeuvrée. Paris: Bourgois, 1990. Search in Google Scholar
Neocleous, Mark. “The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx’s Vampires.” History of Political Thought 24.4 (Winter 2003): 668–84.Search in Google Scholar
Oberstar, Ciril. “Komunizem smrti” (The Communism of Death). Dialogi 43.11–12 (2007): 41–70. Search in Google Scholar
Pocket Interlinear New Testament. Ed. Jay P. Green Sr. Grand Rapids MI: Baker Book House, 1983. Search in Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory. Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1976. Search in Google Scholar
Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983. 10.7591/9781501743429-007Search in Google Scholar
Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 10.1515/9781400847358Search in Google Scholar
Scholem, Gerschom. Walter Benjamin – die Geschichte einer Freundschaft. 1975. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1990. Search in Google Scholar
Шкловский, Ви́ктор Б. (Viktor B. Shklovsky). “Искусство как прием” (Isskustvo kak priëm). 1917. О теории прозы. Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929. 7–23.Search in Google Scholar
Шкловский, Ви́ктор Б. (Viktor B. Shklovsky). Khod’ konia. Berlin: Helikon, 1923.Search in Google Scholar
Шкловский, Ви́ктор Б. (Viktor B. Shklovsky). O teorii prozy. Moscow and Leningrad: Krug, 1925. Search in Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. A Sentimental Journey. Memoirs, 1917–1922. 1923. Trans. Richard Sheldon. London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012. Search in Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love. 1923. Trans. Richard Sheldon. London: Dalkey Archive P, 2012. Search in Google Scholar
Sommer, Doris. The Work of Art in the World. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. 10.1515/9780822377122Search in Google Scholar
Stegmann, Vera. “Navid Kermani’s Literary Reflection.” The Brecht Yearbook 40. Ed. Theodore F. Rippey. Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, Suffolk: Camden House, 2016, 201–16. Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “15 Theses about Communism and Yugoslavia, or The Two-Headed Janus of Emancipation through the State.“ Critical Quarterly 57.2 (2015): 90–110. 10.1111/criq.12142Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “Brecht and Subjectivity: Stance, Emotion as Sympathy.” Darko Suvin: A Life in Letters. Ed. Phillip E. Wegner. Vashon Island WA: Paradoxa, 2011. 133–57. Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “Brechtian or Pseudo‑Brechtian: Mythical Estrangement in the Berliner Ensemble Adaptation of Coriolanus.” Assaph: Studies in Theatre 3 (1986): 135–58. Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “Can People Be (Re)Presented in Fiction?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 663–96. 10.1007/978-1-349-19059-1_47Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Marxist Figuralism: Open Dramaturgy as Open History.” To Brecht and Beyond. 166–184. Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “Death into Life: For a Poetics of Anti-Capitalist Alternative.” Socialism & Democracy 26.2 (July 2012): 91–105. Reprinted in In Leviathan’s Belly: Essays for a Counter-Revolutionary Time. Baltimore MD: Wildside P for Borgo P, 2012. 309–30.10.1080/08854300.2012.686294Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction, and Political Epistemology. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “Heavenly Food Denied: Life of Galileo.” The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. Eds. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 139–52. 10.1017/CCOL0521414466.011Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “Salvation Now, for All Flesh!” To Brecht and Beyond. 131–65.Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. To Brecht and Beyond. Brighton: Harvester P, and New York: Barnes & Noble, 1984. Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “Transubstantiation of Production and Creation.” Minnesota Review n.s. no 18 (Spring 1982): 102–15. Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “The Use Value of Dying: Magical vs. Cognitive Utopian Desire in the ‘Learning Plays’ of Pseudo-Zenchiku, Waley, and Brecht.” Lessons of Japan: Assayings of Some Intercultural Stances. Montréal: Ciadest, 1996. 177–216, https://monoskop.org/images/d/d9/Suvin_Darko_1996_The_Use-Value_of_Dying.pdf. Accessed 1 Aug. 2017.Search in Google Scholar
Suvin, Darko. “What and How Are Poets For in Our Age of Want.” Unpublished manuscript.10.1215/00265667-7137305Search in Google Scholar
Tanakh: the holy scriptures. The new JPS translation according to the traditional Hebrew text. Philadelphia et al: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985.Search in Google Scholar
Timpanaro, Sebastiano. Sul materialismo. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1975. Search in Google Scholar
Ure, Michael, and Mervyn Frost, eds. The Politics of Compassion. London: Routledge, 2014. 10.4324/9781315851389Search in Google Scholar
Wirth, Andrzej. “Semeiological Aspects of the Ta’ziyeh.” Ta’ziyeh. Ed. Peter Chelkowski. New York: New York UP, 1979. 32–9. Search in Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. “The Communist Hypothesis.” First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso, 2009, 86–151.Search in Google Scholar
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Parables and Uses of a Stumbling Stone
- Hausen außer Haus: Transitorische Räume in Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping (1980) und Ernst Augustins Robinsons blaues Haus (2012)
- Von dem Trauma des anderen und der Sehnsucht nach Behausung in Lutz Seilers Roman Kruso (2014)
- “The same blinding void as before”: Irish Neutrality in Samuel Beckett’s nouvelles
- Sprechende Körper: Somatische und semiotische Spuren der Hysterie in T. S. Eliots „Hysteria“
- Problématique du désir et du plaisir chez Honoré de Balzac et Cao Xueqin
- Écrire ‹ l’oral › dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau
- Reviews
- Carlo Umberto Arcuri und Andreas Pfersmann, Hgg.: Lukács 2016: cent ans de „Théorie du roman“. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016 (Zeitschrift Romanesques 8 [2016]). 305 S.
- David E. Wellbery: Goethes Faust I: Reflexion der tragischen Form. Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2016. 100 pp.
- Joseph Wälzholz: Der asoziale Aufklärer: Salomon Maimons „Lebensgeschichte“. Göttingen: Wallenstein Verlag, 2016. 189 pp.
- John K. Noyes: Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism. U of Toronto P: Toronto, CN, 2015. 402 pp.
- Chloé Chaudet : Écritures de l’engagement par temps de mondialisation. Paris : Classiques Garnier (Perspectives comparatistes), 2016. 392 pp.
- Franco Moretti: Distant Reading. Übers. Christine Pries. Konstanz: Konstanz UP, 2016. 220 S.
- Christoph Benjamin Schulz: Poetiken des Blätterns. Hildesheim, Zürich und New York: Georg Olms, 2015 (Literatur – Wissen – Poetik, Bd. 4). 492 S.
- Michael Wögerbauer, Petr Píša, Petr Šámal und Pavel Janáček, Hgg.: Im öffentlichen Interesse. Zensur und soziale Regulierung von Literatur in der modernen tschechischen Kultur 1749–2014. (V obecném zájmu. Cenzura a sociální regulace literatury v moderní české kultuře 1749–2014). Prag: Academia, ÚČL AV ČR, 2015. 2 Bde. 1661 S.
- Horst-Jürgen Gerigk: Lesendes Bewusstsein. Untersuchungen zur philosophischen Grundlage der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016 (Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Neue Folge, Bd. 42). 214 S.
- Ulrich Gaier: Wozu braucht der Mensch Dichtung? Anthropologie und Poetik von Platon bis Musil. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2017. 300 S.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Parables and Uses of a Stumbling Stone
- Hausen außer Haus: Transitorische Räume in Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping (1980) und Ernst Augustins Robinsons blaues Haus (2012)
- Von dem Trauma des anderen und der Sehnsucht nach Behausung in Lutz Seilers Roman Kruso (2014)
- “The same blinding void as before”: Irish Neutrality in Samuel Beckett’s nouvelles
- Sprechende Körper: Somatische und semiotische Spuren der Hysterie in T. S. Eliots „Hysteria“
- Problématique du désir et du plaisir chez Honoré de Balzac et Cao Xueqin
- Écrire ‹ l’oral › dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau
- Reviews
- Carlo Umberto Arcuri und Andreas Pfersmann, Hgg.: Lukács 2016: cent ans de „Théorie du roman“. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016 (Zeitschrift Romanesques 8 [2016]). 305 S.
- David E. Wellbery: Goethes Faust I: Reflexion der tragischen Form. Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2016. 100 pp.
- Joseph Wälzholz: Der asoziale Aufklärer: Salomon Maimons „Lebensgeschichte“. Göttingen: Wallenstein Verlag, 2016. 189 pp.
- John K. Noyes: Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism. U of Toronto P: Toronto, CN, 2015. 402 pp.
- Chloé Chaudet : Écritures de l’engagement par temps de mondialisation. Paris : Classiques Garnier (Perspectives comparatistes), 2016. 392 pp.
- Franco Moretti: Distant Reading. Übers. Christine Pries. Konstanz: Konstanz UP, 2016. 220 S.
- Christoph Benjamin Schulz: Poetiken des Blätterns. Hildesheim, Zürich und New York: Georg Olms, 2015 (Literatur – Wissen – Poetik, Bd. 4). 492 S.
- Michael Wögerbauer, Petr Píša, Petr Šámal und Pavel Janáček, Hgg.: Im öffentlichen Interesse. Zensur und soziale Regulierung von Literatur in der modernen tschechischen Kultur 1749–2014. (V obecném zájmu. Cenzura a sociální regulace literatury v moderní české kultuře 1749–2014). Prag: Academia, ÚČL AV ČR, 2015. 2 Bde. 1661 S.
- Horst-Jürgen Gerigk: Lesendes Bewusstsein. Untersuchungen zur philosophischen Grundlage der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016 (Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Neue Folge, Bd. 42). 214 S.
- Ulrich Gaier: Wozu braucht der Mensch Dichtung? Anthropologie und Poetik von Platon bis Musil. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2017. 300 S.