CourseLover

(12)

$10/per page/Negotiable

About CourseLover

Levels Tought:
Elementary,Middle School,High School,College,University,PHD

Expertise:
Algebra,Applied Sciences See all
Algebra,Applied Sciences,Architecture and Design,Art & Design,Biology,Business & Finance,Calculus,Chemistry,Engineering,Health & Medical,HR Management,Law,Marketing,Math,Physics,Psychology,Programming,Science Hide all
Teaching Since: May 2017
Last Sign in: 185 Weeks Ago, 1 Day Ago
Questions Answered: 27237
Tutorials Posted: 27372

Education

  • MCS,MBA(IT), Pursuing PHD
    Devry University
    Sep-2004 - Aug-2010

Experience

  • Assistant Financial Analyst
    NatSteel Holdings Pte Ltd
    Aug-2007 - Jul-2017

Category > Philosophy Posted 01 Sep 2017 My Price 10.00

2 page essay on The epic of GIlgamesh

Derrida Needs to be: 2 pages, double spaced.

Required readingsThe epic of Gilgamesh 

Derrida, Selections from The Beast and the Sovereign II  Derrida

Negrón, “Why do Some Love Islands? Why Others Don’t? Negron 

Why Do Some Love Islands? Why Don’t Others?

Mara Negrón, University of Puerto Rico

 

*Este texto recoge la conferencia que Mara Negrón leyó el 5 de noviembre de 2011 en la sesión de clausura  de la conferencia “Comparative Caribbeans”, organizada por los estudiantes doctorales Ania Kowalik, Christina León, y Ronald Mendoza de Jesús del departamento de literatura comparada de Emory University en Atlanta, Georgia. La sesión de clausura contó también con la participaciónde su colega y amigo Rubén Ríos Ávila, proveyendo una elocuente y hermosa manifestación de la generosidad en el pensar. rmdj

 

The title of this conference is a quotation which, as a drifting fragment, I transplant into my text. I could say of this paraphrased quotation that it drifts as an island on my text, my world, my sea. “What is an island?” Derrida poses this question to himself in his 2002 seminar The Beast and the Sovereign; a question that has inspired both my title here and the reading that I will attempt of a short text from Jamaica Kincaid entitled A Small Place. Derrida asks: “Why do some people love islands while others don’t?” («Pourquoi certains aiment-ils les îles alors que d’autres n’aiment pas les îles?»).[1] And after raising this question, he states something that must be perceived as enigmatic to anyone that, whether by birth or shipwreck, has ended up on an island (I quote): “One cannot dissociate the figure of the island from the experience of running away”. («On ne peut pas dissocier la figure de l’île de l’expérience de la fuite.»)[2]

An island and running away come down to the same. As Derrida tells us, an island is thus the experience of taking flight. And this statement we should understand in its two-way trajectory. On the one hand, someone that lives on an island could want to run away from the island, aspiring to leave behind her such an enclosed and isolated space. But on the other hand, and this is most important, we should also understand the figure of the island as the experience of running away itself (la fuite), in the sense that all running away is desire of an island, a desire that is determined by the search for refuge in an isolated, solitary place. One runs away to be with oneself, in one’s own solitude, if such a thing is possible. Hence, it is not that we are before two different options, whether to run away from the island or to run away to the island, but that instead every running away, every withdrawal into oneself supposes the desire to be an island.

Therefore, the island is in itself a sort of running away, an experience of impossible dwelling. The island is an aspiration of the “ego” to his sovereignty, which always cracks. This, inasmuch as at the moment that I finally reach the shores of my island, it immediately gets populated by everything I have left behind, including that powerful force that pushes me to build a world. For every island seeks to have a world.

The Beast and the Sovereignprivileges the figure of the island, the Island of desperation, the figure Robinson Crusoe in his isolation, and his loneliness as constituent of that which western philosophy, and in particular Heidegger, has named a world. “And the relation of the world to solitude will be our subject this year.” («Et le rapport du monde à la solitude sera notre sujet cette année.»)[3] Derrida further differentiates between being alone and being the only one. It’s a seminar, as he describes it, about “what it means «to be alone» or «I am alone»” («que veut dire “être seul” ou “je suis seul”»).[4] Robinson Crusoe is a sovereign on his island. He is a sovereign in so far as he is the only one that exercises sovereignty, that his sovereignty is unshared, indivisible. Derrida insists: “The sovereign is alone (the only one) or he isn’t (one)” («Le souverain est seul (souverain) ou il n’est pas»).[5] And I ask myself: Is there any other way of being in the world, of having a world that isn’t this solitary sovereignty, this sovereignty of an indivisible island?

The island is the world’s uniqueness, its oneness, its unity – a world as anisland for all of us in spite of our cultural and historical differences, in spite of thebiodiversity of the animal kingdom –, as much as it is the imperialist’s mentality – with respect to the multiplicity that an island may entail: “There is no world but only islands” («Il n’y a pas de monde, il n’y a que des îles»).[6] The world is thus an archipelago of worlds. Only an island can be sovereign, and all sovereignty is insular in its structure. And yet curiously, an impossible sovereignty has been the Caribbean’s destiny, yes, its destiny without destiny. And I ask: Is there such a thing as the Caribbean, not in its geographical sense but as a shared experience of identity? Permit me to say that we are islands, a multiplicity of islands.

The Beast and the Sovereign deals greatly with the world, with what it means to have a world, and with why, as Derrida interrogates Heidegger and his 1929 seminar The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude: “the stone has no world, the animal is poor in world, and the man is world- configuring or world-forming” (“der Stein ist weltlos, das Tier ist weltarm, der Mensch ist weltbildend”).[7] The island is a part of the world; the world is made of islands, it is made of drifting solitudes. What happens then if the “having a world” and the “world- configuring” ultimately remit us to the impossibility of there being a single world? And that instead there are world-islands. But what if what it is about is that the stone can have a world or not, that the animal can be poor in world or not, and that the woman can configure worlds? Then, the world would not be the empirical objective world of science, not the earth or the place that I inhabit, but an experience that can be had or not, and that can be lost.

Questioning the anthropocentric presuppositions that lie under Heidegger’s three-prong statement, Derrida suggests that at a given moment we could find ourselves in a state of weltlos, of no-world, that while different from the stone, wouldstill imply an absence of world. Derrida’s magnificent example is Paul Celan’s verseon mourning: “The world is gone, I must carry you” (« Die welt ist fort ich muß dich tragen »).[8] What world do we have when we’ve lost someone or something we love? Doesn’t this loss suppose a state of weltlos, an absence of world? Derrida asks: “Now, how then to think this absence of a world, this no- world? A no-world that isn’t unworld-like, foul or filthy?”[9]

[I need to explain something here before I can continue to read what I prepared for you. In English, the word “unworldly” has the sense of someone or something that is idealistic, not materialistic, and also unsophisticated; however, in the quote that I just read to you, Derrida used a word that condenses two meanings which I am interested in preserving in this impossible crossing of languages. It is the polysemous word of “immonde,” which mainly refers to the image of something that is unclean, but that also evocates in a certain sense an absence of world. I am trying to think a concept of the “unworld-like” in the terms I just described to you, to give it the meaning of Derrida’s use. And now I can continue.]

(«Alors, comment penser l’absence du monde, le non-monde ? Un non- monde qui n’est pas immonde ? »).[10] Derrida is suggesting that this lack of world can also be thought-of as filthy in the sense that it produces a disorder, that it is disharmonizing, that gets dirty, that becomes something abject. In Latin, the etymology of the adjective mundus (world) implies cleanliness, neatness, elegance, in opposition to what would be “unworld-like”, foul, vile, impure, and abject:

The world as a totality of beings is also an order, appropriate, proper, and clean, a good arrangement, a harmony or a beauty. And what is [“immonde”/unworld- like], even if it isn’t an absence of world, in the sense of Weltlosigkeit, isn’t totally foreign to this idea.[11]

Thus, this uncleanness that implies the “Immonde/unworld-like” isn’t the same as an absence of world, but there’s proximity between the no-world and the abject, the no-world and this absence of beauty.

In what follows, what I will propose to you is a reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place that is “immonde/unworld-like” or abject, in the sense of an absence of world or of an unforgiving rage to organize a world too much. In the last section of this powerful book, at the end of the tour around Antigua, after having brought about the tourist from the airport to the beach, after having shown him the public library ruins, after having described to him the post-independence corruption (and also to herself, so is the painful, odd, “immonde/unworld-like” double standpoint that holds the narrating subject), and after having told him of the impossibility of raising funds to reopen the public library, at the end of so much hurt, finally the narrator can write the beauty of the island. A beauty that is somehow too much. The island is not simply beautiful, it is excessively beautiful. It is a beauty that seizes us as unreal. It reveals itself eternal, the island was beautiful before and after its colonization; it is a beauty that ends up being almost a-historical; a beauty that imprisons us, that isolates us. This statement is written as a love declaration, even if it may be an odd declaration of love:

Antigua is beautiful. Antigua is too beautiful. Sometimes the beauty of it seems unreal. Sometimes the beauty of it seems as if it were stage sets for a play, for no real sunset could look like that; no real seawater could strike that many shades of blue at once....[12]

And further ahead in the same section, after having renamed the world, nature and its beauty as something that cannot be real, she insists:

all of this is so beautiful, all of this is not real like any other real thing that there is. It is as if, then the beauty – the beauty of the sea, the land, the air, the trees, the market, the people, the sounds they make – were a prison, and as if everything and everybody inside it were locked in and everything and everybody that is not inside it were locked out.[13]

This beauty, too beautiful, is a prison; it imprisons us on the island. This beauty is so much that it is unreal; that it is the only thing that is, and always has been, its gift and its curse (and we could say this of the whole of the Caribbean): Antigua is too beautiful. This declaration of beauty stands as both the will for Antigua’s mourning of an historical and irreparable loss, and as a tentative to inscribe what has never been had:“They have nothing to compare this incredible constant [unreal beauty] with, no big historical moment, to compare the way they are now to the way they used to be. No industrial Revolution....”[14]

A Small Place is the story of an un-world/immonde, of not having a sovereign world. The history of the Caribbean – the one of its colonization, its extermination and slavery, as well as its modern one in all its possibilities of political survival –, supposes a great deal of foulness; all this is written with rage on Kincaid’s text. It is the writing of an impossible forgiveness:“I am filled with rage. [...] But nothing can erase my rage – not an apology, not a large sum of money, not the death of a criminal – for this wrong can never be made right, and only the impossible can make me still: can a way be found to make what happened not have happened?”[15]

It is with this rage that the work of Jamaica Kincaid is written. If we had to ask: What is there after this foul, immonde/unworld-like history, after a history that has deprived us of a history? She would respond: There is this beauty: Antigua is so beautiful...

I would like to digress here for a moment to clarify my interest in what I have been naming until now as the “immonde”, “abject”; word turned into concept by Julia Kristeva in her book Pouvoirs de l’horreur (“Powers of Horror”). Let the few remarks that I will make here stand for a restrained and partial critique of Kristeva’s theory that for reasons of time I will not be able to develop. I read in Kristeva’s propositions a reformulation of Lacan’s statements but with a particular accent on the phallic mother’s body. In what concerns her account of the logic of perversion, I would like to put forward that it can be translated into “master and slave” terms. As you know, under this logic we can only redundantly change positions, that is to say, at some point the slave gets to become the master and vice versa, and we are set up in a position of dependency to the structure, (to every slave his master, etc.)

This machine of repetition produces death and horror. I am not interested here in describing this logic in further detail, because I think that we already know it too well. However, what do interests me may be stated by the following question: In what way can we politicize Kristeva’s propositions to stretch them out to a realm neglected by psychoanalysis, to wit, a pre-objectual state, the abject? In its pathological form, the abject supposes an internalization of the super-ego. Kristeva summarizes it this way: “To each ego its object, to each superego its abject” («A chaque moi son objet, à chaque surmoi son abject»).[16] In other words, to each master its slave, that is to say, the need of a border in constituting a sovereign ego. The abject marks the limitof that which threatens what I am and shatters me. It is a border without which wecannot think subjectivity, but it is also a border that implies a threat. In this way, Kristeva’s lacanian scheme proves too Hegelian, operating its synthesis or sublation in the form of a return to the object of desire that reinstates the subject in its sovereignty, in its insularity. Everything goes back to order with the return to language; everything is resolved after the purifying catharsis.

It is true that Kristeva doesn’t use in 1980, the year of publication of this text, the term of sovereignty, and much less the one of insularity to describe this relational structure between the ego and language, just as she doesn’t speak in “slave and master” terms. Nevertheless, I believe that we can politicize in this way the psychoanalytical category of abjection to account, through the readings of aesthetic works, for the phantasmatic structures that insistently have characterized and determined the political becoming of the islands of the Caribbean. Don’t their broken dreams of sovereignty owe something to the abjection inherent in the mirrored relationship between “master and slave”, always returning to its point of departure? Reading history from a psychoanalytical point of view supposes recognizing that the colonial abjection is both structural and circumstantial. Thus, the structural abjection forces us to say that colonialism is structural to the ego, “for every ego its law”, so that in a certain sense, if we paraphrase Freud, colonialism would be our destiny. And yet it is true that psychoanalysis permits us to question the all too settled certainties of political and sociological discourse. However, my questioning of the island, of the island as a running away, of the island as an absence of world, and thus, of the “immonde”/unworld-like or unreal island, as Jamaica Kincaid calls it, is not interested in the description of this opposition between the “ego” and the “other”, the “master and the slave”, but instead in thedestabilization of such a structure, in its problematization in a text that in appearance is written from such an opposition.

The structure Derrida examines is the one of the autobiography, be it in Defoe or in Heidegger, whose seminar on the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics ends up being in many respects autobiographical. Derrida is no longer interested in accounting for the advent to language as a wake of the subject’s symptoms, but is instead lingering on the question: what is a world?, how can we have a world?, versus the animal that would be poor in world. And hence, the islands, the egos are in the world, they constitute it. The ego-island is our way of being in the world, the point from which I invent the world. The island is thus an impossible desire of solitude. The island aspires to its solitude, to its sovereignty, but it’s an impossible withdrawal. In line with this conceptual framework I want to reformulate the abject, or better yet the “immonde”, not as a narcissistic crisis but as a crisis of sovereignty, whether it be in the sovereign subject or in sovereignty as the regulatory and configuring abstraction of the modern state.

I continue to drift but I would like to arrive at Kincaid’s library. I swim amidst two worlds, two island-worlds; every ego is an island-world, Derrida’s, and the little island of Jamaica Kincaid the writer. Antigua is “a small place.” Before being an island it is a “place”, and that place is “small”. A Small Place is a letter thrown to the sea that the writer published for New Yorker readers in nineteen eighty eight. Jamaica Kincaid is writing to a tourist, a white-man, maybe American, or “even worse”, according to her, European. “A tourist is an ugly human being” (p.16), she affirms. This letter is the meeting-place of two worlds, the one of the once-colonizer tourist, and the one of his tourist-guide, that woman from Antigua, that writer thattells the story without history of that “small place”. Jamaica Kincaid, who lives in theU.S. and not in Europe, that would be worse, returns to the island, makes us go back to her island, the island of her childhood, the island colonized by Englishmen and transformed into a tourist trap by its independence, transformed into a tourist showcase and latrine corruptly governed by Antiguans. She is writing to declare not to possess any other than that Antigua of her childhood, an Antigua constructed by Englishmen: “Have I given you the impression that the Antigua I-grew-up-in revolved almost completely around England? Well, that was so. I met the world through England, and if the world wanted to meet me it would have to do so through England.”[17]

The emblematic moment of this Island’s history is its 1974 earthquake, just before its independence. The building that lodged the library, for which the writer confesses to be particularly fond, was destroyed in this earthquake. The emblem or symptom of the “small place’s ugly history” is gathered in a sign that decorates the façade of this beautiful colonial building – a building that may be the enlightened European’s dream, but that is also the European’s library the islander has made her own and that she wants to restore (and I quote): “This building was damaged in the earthquake of 1974. Repairs are pending.”[18] “Repairs are pending.” Let us understand reparation in all its meanings. A reparation of the irreparable: the acts of slavery and exploitation. “To repair” also in the sense of an impossible forgiveness since we cannot erase the history of slavery and colonization, but above all because to repair we would have to restore what was once there, and what was there before the earthquake was that island, that extrapolation of the European world that is no more. It is worth asking: What was there before colonization that we might want to rescue in order to be? How to be if this being doesn’t go across the history of the other? What can I say that I am thatdoesn’t go through the history of colonization, and its library? Impossible to start from zero. Not even Robinson Crusoe in his island. It remains the natural beauty of this island that possesses something odd since it imprisons, and that is the only thing the islanders have always had, before and after colonization, before and after slavery: “The unreal way in which it is beautiful now that they are a free people is the unreal way in which it was beautiful when they were slaves.”[19] At the end, at the very end of this text, the “rubbish” colonizers and the “noble and exalted” slaves cease to be what they were to simply become “human beings.”

A Small Place oscillates between ugliness and beauty, repulsiveness and desire, between the proper and the improper. It is an attempt to recover a world, an island, and a beauty that is “immonde”/unworld-like in so far as it is an implausible beauty.

We all love and we all hate the islands of the Caribbean, if such a thing as the Caribbean can be named beyond its geographical demarcation. Or maybe the only thing we name with that word is its beauty, the Caribbean’s beauty. We all love- hate islands. We all want to be on an island. We all want to run away and abandon our island. We all run away but in our escape we just go back to our island, in the distance we just revisit our island; we revisit its history, its literature. In the distance, we all remake its history. The island does not leave us. The island that inhabits me is the one that won’t leave me, to the point that in the distance I continue to be that island that for some moments I hate. The island is as real and unreal as its beauty. And every island is beautiful, “Immonde”/unworld-like beautiful. Isn’t it?

 



[1] Jacques Derrida. Séminaire, La bête et le souverain Volume II (2002-2003). (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 106.

[2]Derrida,106.

[3] Derrida, 21.

[4] Derrida, 21.

[5]  Derrida, 30.

[6] Derrida, 31.

[7] Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt - Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2004), 273.

[8] Paul Celan, Atemwende. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 93.

[9] Derrida, 32.

[10]Derrida, 32.

[11]Derrida,32.

[12]Jamaica Kincaid. A Small Place. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988), 5

[13]Kincaid, 77-79.

[14]Kincaid, 78.

[15]Kincaid, 32

[16] Julia Kristeva. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection. (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 10.

[17]Kincaid, 33.

[18]Kincaid, 9.

[19]Kincaid, 80.

 

Discription: 

must choose a central theme in one of the books (preferable epic of Gilgamesh) and provide a short commentary that relates to the other works 

must not be a summery but focus one theme

 

 

 

 

Attachments:

Answers

(12)
Status NEW Posted 01 Sep 2017 02:09 PM My Price 10.00

----------- He-----------llo----------- Si-----------r/M-----------ada-----------m -----------Tha-----------nk -----------You----------- fo-----------r u-----------sin-----------g o-----------ur -----------web-----------sit-----------e a-----------nd -----------acq-----------uis-----------iti-----------on -----------of -----------my -----------pos-----------ted----------- so-----------lut-----------ion-----------. P-----------lea-----------se -----------pin-----------g m-----------e o-----------n c-----------hat----------- I -----------am -----------onl-----------ine----------- or----------- in-----------box----------- me----------- a -----------mes-----------sag-----------e I----------- wi-----------ll

Not Rated(0)