The Rest is Silence: A Remark on the Micro-Fascism of Critique

This article interrogates the function of shame in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, through Lacanian psychoanalysis and the concept of l'hontologie. I examine the paradoxical way in which the character of Doctor O'Connor relates to and tentatively treats the shame that follows in the trail of the main character, Robin Vote. On the one hand, the Doctor addresses the real cause of shame as being that of imaginary castration, of being exposed as inherently lacking the object of desire. As Robin reveals to her partners, in leaving them, that they do not possess neither her nor her wants, she also reveals their potent egos to be frauds covering over their inherent lacks, thereby causing shame. On the other hand, the Doctor contributes to the covering over of these inherent lacks by his incessant talk. Most notably, he covers over his own lack, inasmuch as he revels in his assumed role as the omniscient doctor, the master able to pinpoint the essence of being and palliate the ailments of humanity, by way of speaking. In the last instance, his talking does not amount to much besides keeping his own shame momentarily at bay. My reading of the function of shame in Nightwood and the character of the Doctor might serve to supplement the more common appreciations of the novel as either a recuperative attempt for the sexual abjects and marginal misfits of history or a celebration of loss and alterity per se. Rather, I read the novel as an experience in the impotence and impossibility implied in being human tout court. If not sub specie aeternitatis, that is to say, under the perspective of eternity, as in the philosophical interrogations of Spinoza, then at least sub specie vanitatis, under the perspective of that which passes, or to put it more colloquially, under the perspective of our times, it can be asserted that Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (1936) has risen to its rightful position as a modernist classic. Its position is warranted not only on account of its bold formal experiments, such as its bewildering poetic qualities and the dreamlike ramblings of Doctor Matthew-mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor, but also on account of its content. We find in Nightwood many of the constituent themes and motifs of modernism, such as the disintegration of values, the crisis of culture implied by industrialisation and urbanisation and its consequent questioning of identity, subjectivity and sexuality, the impending feeling of being everywhere and nowhere at home, of belonging to all and to none, with the possibility

Night studies. Regards croisés sur les nouveaux visages de la nuit, 2020

The seventeen full-length articles gathered here represent a range of disciplines broader than is usual in the emerging field of “night studies”. We are pleased to include texts offering the analysis of quantitative social data alongside others engaged in the aesthetic analysis of theatrical works, to set reflections on the African urban night market alongside a study of women’s night time safety in peripheral cities of France and Mexico. A particular strength of this volume, we believe, is that it moves beyond the unitary focus on night-time culture and entertainment (what the English language calls “nightlife”) in order to examine the night-time work of scientific researchers or speak of citizen projects to install nocturnal gardens in cities. It has become a cliché of night studies to note that there are “many nights”, defined, constructed and lived differently for a wide variety of reasons. In some of the essays published here, authors go beyond this simple recognition of pluralism in order to theorize a “transversal” night, cutting across different publics and practices and resisting any sense of a singular “night world”.

2020

This lecture was originally delivered in Guayaquil in July 2019. An abridged version of the lecture was published in Siegfried Zielinski and Charles Merewether (eds), Art in the 21st Century: Reflections and Provocations (Osage Publications, 2020). See the link.

The following research paper is an attempt to focus the theme of alienation, isolation and estrangement in Frost's sonnet " Acquainted with the Night ". Apparently, a record of personal loneliness and isolation but a close reading reveals the implied sadness on the plight of alienated humanity. This universal expression of gloom and the plaintive note regarding indifference of modern man turns this personal lyric into an elegy of dying humanity. It has been analyzed how an individual reacts towards the frosty silence of surrounding and mechanical indifference of the fellowmen in the scientifically advanced world. The etherized existence in the global village of modern technology has transformed the world into a gloomy and isolated place where robotlike creatures are roaming about.

Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2018

This essay represents the Closing Remarks for the Opening Session of the 2017 National Communication Association annual convention. It attempts to make usable the profound thoughts and rhetoric experienced in a session of performative pleasure and protest.

Thesis Proposal, 2022

This thesis proposal outlines my attempt to address an issue related to Heidegger's analysis of the type of being that we are (Dasein) in relation to the other (Mitsein). The main point under investigation concerns a tension between Heidegger's claim that Dasein and Mitsein are “equiprimordial” and his discussion of a “district” (der Bezirk) in his later thought which potentially precedes a relation to Mitsein. I attempt to account for this sense of “district” through a three-fold relation involving what I term primal absence, primordial absence, and the nocturnal, ultimately trying to develop a deep sense in which this three-fold relation plays a foundational role in constituting Dasein and Mitsein, chiefly with respect to the sense in which Dasein is always already outside itself. I approach this through the phenomenological and hermeneutic lens of Being and Time, Robert Sokolowski and Dan Zahavi’s account of Husserlian inner time consciousness, Paul Ricoeur’s account in Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another, and Heidegger’s views on the equiprimordiality of time and space. Though not included in the proposal itself, my thesis work pivoted heavily into Levinas’ work on our relation to the other—specifically in Totality and Infinity. My approach to the “nocturnal” later drew from Raoul Moati’s text Levinas and the Night of Being, which is where the phrase “the nocturnal face of being” derives. Rather than grounding the nocturnal in Husserl’s inner time consciousness as a constitutive dimension of being, I began to approach this from what Moati terms a “nocturnal phenomenology,” grounding the term “nocturnal” in his Levinassian account of messianic eschatology.

Sleep: Multi-Professional Perspectives, 2012

What is this secession from conscious life that we call sleep, this oblivious third of our lives? We usually think little of it, but it is always hovering around as a pending transaction or impending obligation. It visits us, or we it, with fuzzy regularity largely beyond our control. Yet we must submit to it somehow or perish. For if, as Prospero imagines, 'our little life / Is rounded with a sleep' (The Tempest,, life also must be relentlessly intersected by little deaths, by the incessant, cyclic return of slumber.

It is impossible to put it in writing, but to record the horror of the thing here is a black cross mark. The Cabal of Hypocrites, Mikhail Bulgakov

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2019

This article deals with the theme of openness in Roberto Bolaño’s novel Monsieur Pain. Drawing on Blanchot’s formulation of “the other night,” I locate in the hiccups present throughout Bolaño’s novel an openness that suspends and undoes itself, thus critiquing conceptions of openness as pure emptiness such as those at work in Agamben’s philosophy, and in the contemporary discourses around convenience and infinite possibility.