Dear lit theory/aesthetics people, if you were researching the unrepresentable, or the limits of representation, where would you start? Key thinkers, texts, or concepts?
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Kant on the sublime and the long reception of that thinking. For him the sublime is all about the limits of presentation. There’s a book called The Sublime Reader that might be useful.
Going theological, there's the whole apophatic or negative theology tradition that grapples with the unrepresentability of God. There are Jewish, Christian and Islamic iterations of this.
Contemporary scholars give it a literary, often Derridean, turn:
This is perfect thanks. I need to explore these traditions more to understand how they inform developments in my period of the mid 20th century (I have a chapter on cybernetic spirituality)
Some literary authors (a bit randomly): Beckett, Perec, Handke, Bataille, Modiano, Bioy Casares.
Other: the concept of the uncanny in psychoanalysis, and in the arts. Freud, Lacan, Kohon.
Might also be worth checking out Douglas Kearney's "Optic Subwoof," which has a chapter about silence and building a poetics of sonic unrepresentability, and another about the ways in which violence resists representation. He discusses "Zong" at least once in that book
perhaps not to start with, but Husserl's non-representational theory of mind and phenomenology, and Deleuze and Guattari on multiplicity/agencement, where things are constituted by a constellation of ‘utterances, modes of expressions […] signs' (see Two Regimes of Madness), might be useful?
Much of my own research and publishing has been on Coetzee and I would say that the critical discussion around some of his novels--particularly "Life and Times of Michael K" and "Waiting for the Barbarians" might be right up your alley! I wish you the best in your work!
I am not an Adorno expert but I think the most famous quote is from Prisms “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. But (not 100% sure I have this right) it runs across all his work including Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. But possibly I am misunderstanding your question too.
No that’s perfect. I’d forgotten that quote but you’re right, it’s part of a pretty widespread idea that the holocaust in particular is unrepresentable and a problem for art in general. Thank you
Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying.
Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy
Ann Banfield “Describing the Unobserved: Events Grouped around an Empty Center “ in Fabb et al. The Linguistics of Writing
Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination and Rule of Metaphor, some of the early sections Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, Timothy Bewes’ Free Indirect (and his older essay from Differences on Literary Landscape).
From the standpoint of practicing authors, John Barth’s essays, “Limits of Imagination,” + “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism” as well as the suite of essays from William Gass’s Fiction and the Figures of Life are also very, very good
Badiou’s Being and Event makes the case for a non-representative vision of truth. The whole book can be read as a criticism of representation in various senses.
I told a scholar I admire once my interests and they were like why aren’t you reading all of Badiou. So ok, thanks, this is it, I’m finally going for it
I have a love-hate relationship to him. Annoyed by his over-theorized writing, but he’s a nice corrective to a lot of French theory. Žižek’s chapter on him in The Ticklish Subject is a great summary of B&E.
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Contemporary scholars give it a literary, often Derridean, turn:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/cloud-of-the-impossible/9780231171151
Other: the concept of the uncanny in psychoanalysis, and in the arts. Freud, Lacan, Kohon.
Amy Hollywood's "Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History"
William Frankie's "A Philosophy of the Unsayable"
Vladimir Jakelevitch's work on silence
I'd also echo Philip's "Zong" (plus scholarship on it) and Wittgenstein
M. NourbeSe Philip's "Zong!"
Said's *Orientalism* and *The Question of Palestine*
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/TraumaTheoryBib.html
Ghostly Matters
Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy
Ann Banfield “Describing the Unobserved: Events Grouped around an Empty Center “ in Fabb et al. The Linguistics of Writing
Lukacs on reification?