Volume 57, Issue 1

Shylock is the most celebrated and contested figure of a stage Jew, who makes his memorable appearance in Shakespeare’s problematic comedy The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596). His best-known speech “If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?” – often cited out of context as a plea for tolerance – engages with the politics of touch as a way to constitute and at the same time question an emphatic practice of communion. My contribution looks at this speech once again, and at the figure that delivers it, in a double perspective: offering a dramatic exploration of touch management as well as a metatheatrical exploration of the conditions and effects of playacting. Thus, Shakespeare may have staged Shylock’s body politics so as to test the possibilities and power of his own medium, the theatre, to touch.

The article is dedicated to the problem of social bonds that is negotiated in Troilus and Cressida . Troilus and Ulysses embody an old, traditional order of the world that is out of joint, while Cressida’s behaviour and her way of interacting indicate a different and new regime of social regulation that is about to take over. With its complex superposition of (touches of) love and war, Troilus and Cressida brings together rituals of touch, anarchic speech acts, and a gendered perspective on the world that associates touch and temporality with ‘frail’ femininity and temptation. With unrivalled intensity, the play puts to the spectator that the basic condition of touch, i. e. exposing oneself to another, entails an incalculable risk. Hector tragically falls for the vulnerability inherent in touch and the audience suffers with him because they share this existential precondition on which modern society is ‘founded.’ The gloomy, inescapable atmosphere of societal crisis that Troilus and Cressida creates emphasises the fact that the fragility of touch is not to be overcome. The fractions – no matter whether Greek, Trojan, or those of loving couples – cannot simply be reunited to form a new, authentic entity. Generating at least some form of social cohesion therefore remains a challenge.

Representation as a form of embodiment relates to the human body’s capacity to experience emotion. While this dimension for the most part remains latent in institutional politics, theatre as a medium of physical co-presence can foreground it and explore its potential for a critique of practices and institutions of political representation. This article reads Heiner Müller’s Roman play Der Horatier (The Horatian, 1968) as a theatrical reflection on the role of somatic experience in practices and images of political representation. Drawing on recent studies on the embodiment of emotions, on body memory and the experiential quality of representation, as well as on Antonin Artaud’s concepts of theatre and acting, the reading demonstrates how the evocation of somatic experience and bodily feeling constitutes a core strategy in Müller’s work on an anti-representational form of political theatre.

Focusing on Maurice Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable (1983), this text investigates possibilities of thinking and performing communities that interact with and constitute one another “à hauteur de mort” (Bataille).Following the twofold structure of Blanchot’s text, the first part of the essay in its first part unfolds the notion of communitas in order to show how Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Jean-Luc Nancy formulated a new concept of community by distinguishing it from liberal, socialist, Christian or fascist forms of community that all had become extremely problematic by the beginning of the Second World War at the latest. By doing so they themselves performed an ‘unavowable community.’The second part of the essay engages with Marguerite Duras’ La Maladie de la mort , a novella that is the main subject of the second part of La Communauté inavouable . Here, the performative power of language is delineated by means of the idea of a ‘community of lovers’ that manifests itself, in contrast to romantic forms of togetherness and unity, precisely in the breakdown of communicatio and communitas .

The surrealists saw their activity as research, which often resulted in art. However, in surrealist scholarship less attention has been paid to how individual surrealists understood research and how their methods were developed. Many of them, such as Paul Nougé and Roger Caillois, launched serious investigations into the irrational with the aim of acknowledging the affective dimensions of (rational) knowledge. Nougé preferred the rigour of science over literature and mapped out ways to import this rigour into poetics. His unique artistic praxis was based on an understanding of language as neither a transparent medium nor an expression of the subjective, ‘unlimited’ imagination favoured by French surrealism. Instead, Nougé’s notions of language and creative invention were informed by mathematics, in particular the thought of the mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré. For Nougé, scientific research invigorated poetic endeavours as he developed an experimental method that in spirit was closer to mathematics than literary language. The evocation of new phenomena through both science and poetry opened a new view of the human mind: an alternative epistemology of identity, exteriority and the selective evolution of objects.

No critical concept has been more readily associated with the critical writings of T. S. Eliot than tradition, yet the reception of his views in this regard is one of misprision. The paper demonstrates that Eliot’s equally misunderstood notion of historical sense is compatible with, even derives from, Nietzsche’s understanding of the term, as both authors reject the substantialist idea of tradition in favour of the functional one. Since the latter rules out both an eternal essence of the object and a timeless point of view of the observer, the consequences of this genealogy, as a rule neglected or simply ignored by Eliot’s critics, for his concept of tradition in particular, and history in general, are of decisive import.

In this study I confront the work of Thomas Mann with the Jewish question in order to examine the relationship between literary (human) agency and the inferior margins that enable it: those creatures who do not share the language of (the European and civilized) man. Through a reading of several of Mann’s narratives that concern the relationship between human beings and animals as well as texts by Jewish authors, Kafka in German and Agnon in Hebrew, I seek to shed light on the concept of ‘animality,’ a term that implies continuity between the human and the animal, thereby laying bare man’s political precariousness and fragility and aligning the human with the creature by exposing the body. Based on my reading of Mann’s figuration of the dog in the early story “Tobias Mindernickel” (1898), the novella Herr und Hund (1917), and his Jewish mythical depiction of the biblical Joseph as a dog in Joseph und seine Brüder (1933–1943), I argue that Mann’s humanism is limited in that it guards against the mimetic alignment of man with other creatures by portraying the (often muted) creaturely object of the literary depiction as an inferior – albeit frequently admirable – being. By contrasting Mann’s treatment of this question with Jewish literature’s complete immersion in the animal, I suggest how descriptive speech identifies orientalism as a form of descriptive knowledge, thus clarifying as well the process whereby the modern European nation-state was consolidated by its invisible margins. The article thus suggests that literary description is a means to differentiate and gain agency by adhering to language’s elevated and hierarchical terms.