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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    On the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art: Damien Hirst’s “Abject Art” as a Point of Departure
    (英語學系, 2015-03-??) Tsung-huei Huang
    Contemporary artists inclined to integrate animal elements into their works previously justified animal art as a means of reframing thought about life and ethics. But it is debatable whether the juxtaposition of animal and art is simply a gimmick. Damien Hirst’s animal installations, for example, have garnered both widespread acclaim and controversy. Do Hirst’s displays of animal carcasses amount, at best, to so-called “abject art,” or does the auratic perception they evoke serve to catalyze reflexive thoughts on ethics? Investigating Hirst’s animal works, this paper not only seeks to arrive at a better understanding of his oeuvre but also discusses the function of animal death in contemporary art. In the first two sections, Lacanian gaze and Benjaminian aura are drawn upon to explore whether eye-catching art is particularly thought-provoking and more likely to stimulate ethical thinking. The third section inquires into whether some of Hirst’s works are capable of evoking the auratic gaze; and if so, under what conditions do those works cease to be auratic and become abject? The last section compares the works of Hirst and Mark Fairnington to investigate how the auratic gaze emerging from artwork propels us to confront questions of life and ethics without remaining silent on the theme of animal concern.
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    “Still More Distant Than the Most Distant Stars”
    (英語學系, 2011-09-??) Frank Stevenson
    This paper explores some closely-related themes in Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin: a trans-temporal “bridge” that is broken or interrupted in the middle, “breaking news” whose delivery is infinitely delayed or impossible, and the figure of a partially-constructed wall which may also serve as the fragile foundation for a new Tower of Babel. The Benjamin passage at stake is Thesis IX of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where the angel (angelikos, messenger) of history suddenly appears, caught between immanent and eternal time, and wants to (but cannot) “make whole” the fragments of wreckage from human history that are thrown in a heap at his feet. The above themes from Nietzsche and Kafka are used to interpret the angel’s impossible project of making-whole as a project, not of delivering but of reconstructing the original message, now taken as the originally universal and communal human language, meaning or “name” which was fragmented by God into a “babel.” Here this original language, also seen in the context of Benjamin’s still-idealized notion of “pure language” in “The Task of the Translator,” remains metaphorically tied to the figure of the Tower of Babel, a tower whose piecemeal construction, ambiguously decreed by the Emperor in Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” implies the virtual equivalence of (its own) construction and deconstruction or collapse.
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    “Still More Distant Than the Most Distant Stars”
    (英語學系, 2011-09-??) Frank Stevenson
    This paper explores some closely-related themes in Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin: a trans-temporal “bridge” that is broken or interrupted in the middle, “breaking news” whose delivery is infinitely delayed or impossible, and the figure of a partially-constructed wall which may also serve as the fragile foundation for a new Tower of Babel. The Benjamin passage at stake is Thesis IX of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where the angel (angelikos, messenger) of history suddenly appears, caught between immanent and eternal time, and wants to (but cannot) “make whole” the fragments of wreckage from human history that are thrown in a heap at his feet. The above themes from Nietzsche and Kafka are used to interpret the angel’s impossible project of making-whole as a project, not of delivering but of reconstructing the original message, now taken as the originally universal and communal human language, meaning or “name” which was fragmented by God into a “babel.” Here this original language, also seen in the context of Benjamin’s still-idealized notion of “pure language” in “The Task of the Translator,” remains metaphorically tied to the figure of the Tower of Babel, a tower whose piecemeal construction, ambiguously decreed by the Emperor in Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” implies the virtual equivalence of (its own) construction and deconstruction or collapse.
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    On Violence, Justice and Deconstruction
    (英語學系, 2003-01-??) Chung-hsiung Lai
    In this paper, I will first explore the chiasmus relation between violence and metaphysics in the thought of Levinas1 and Derrida. Then, I will move to examine “the aporia2 of justice” in Derrida’s reinterpretation of Benjamin’s critique of violence with respect to law-making and law-preserving. Finally, by problematizing the aporia of deconstruction, I will attempt to provide a critique of Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” in order to place Derrida’s ethical account of deconstruction under erasure. My core contention is: if de- construction is, as Derrida claims, ethical and just, it must be unethical and unjust in the first place in what he calls an “economy of violence.” Violence per se lies at the heart of both deconstructive justice and injustice. Yet, to achieve the former, the latter paradoxi- cally must be accomplished first—a betrayal which functions as the condition of possibility and thus of impossibility of deconstructive justice—thereby making the very moment of deconstructive decision an anxious and painful experience of aporia, or in Kierkegaard’s phrase, “a moment of madness.”