Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219
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Item Invoking the West: Giorgio Agamben’s “Romantic Ideology” and the Civilizational Transference(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Jon SolomonInspired by Giorgio Agamben’s critique of the “Romantic Ideology” that consciously created a tautological equivalency between language and people, this essay is interested in drawing upon elements of the philosopher’s conceptual kit to explore the ways in which his attempt to trace ontological origins recuperates “Romantic ideology” with regard to civilizational difference. We will take as our point of departure the construction of that ambiguous yet ubiquitous civilizational entity, the “West.” In order to tease apart the status of the “West” in Agamben’s work, we will return to the conceptual distinction and historical narrative deployed in one of the philosopher’s earliest works, Language and Death, which plays a seminal role in the development of the author’s later philosophy. Having thus established the moment when the “Romantic Ideology” criticized by Agamben reappears in the form of civilizational transfer, we proceed by way of asking, once again both with and against Agamben, if the “West” might not be seen as a form of translational apparatus such as the concept is critically taken up in the philosopher’s 2006 essay, “What is an Apparatus?” The essay concludes with a reflection on the relation between translation and species difference in the context of the new biospheric colonization that characterizes contemporary capitalism.Item Accepting/Rejecting: China’s Discursive Reconfiguration of Zoe for a New Era in Organ Donation(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Melissa LefkowitzIn the Chinese state’s attempt to rectify its organ shortage, an openly acknowledged problem nationwide, it must harness the body as a source of life. Whose bodies, exactly, form the crux of this paper, and it is here that Giorgio Agamben’s work is useful for a discussion that expands beyond a biopolitics centered on disciplines and technologies of power. Drawing upon articles in the U.S. and Chinese media, this paper analyzes the disparate logics inherent in media coverage following the establishment of China’s voluntary organ donation system in 2010. Though conceived at a great distance, Agamben’s bios/zoe dialectic operates as a fitting tool in the examination of an emergent discourse that is evolving in China, one that harnesses a rhetoric centered on value(s), scientific rationalism and charity in order to re‐define zoe(s) and reinforce the legitimacy of the state.Item “Trafficking in Seeds”: War Bride, Biopolitics, and Asian American Spectrality in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation(英語學系, 2013-09-??) Hsiu-chuan LeeTaking a cue from Pheng Cheah’s discussion of nationalism’s paradoxical relation to life and death and his invocation of the idea of spectral haunting (in light of the Deleuzian “nonorganic vitalism”) as the genuine source of life in postcolonial cultures, this article conceives a life-begetting Asian American ethno-politics via a reading of the ethno- and biopolitics represented in Ruth Ozeki’s novel All Over Creation. I argue that All Over Creation intervenes in the discussion of Asian American ethno-politics of life and death not simply because it engages with food politics and advocates agricultural biodiversity, but also because it creates narrative linkages between biodiversity and ethno-diversity. First, by telling the story of a Japanese war bride, All Over Creation brings to the fore Japanese war brides to emphasize their significance as the “ghostly figures”—or “random seedlings”—occupying the margins of both Asian American and white communities. Moreover, the novel introduces “seed-dissemination” as a(n) (agri)cultural logic that makes “Asian American” less a category of hereditary permanence than an avenue for one to generate and become others. All Over Creation spells out affirmative life forces that sprawl from the migratory trajectories of people and seeds (or “people as seeds”)—trajectories that bring disorganizing force to the inherited logic or vertical continuity of both agricultural and ethnic cultural productions with lateral networking and changeable relationships.