The Geschlecht Complex: Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology

Description

The polysemous German word Geschlecht -- denoting gender, genre, kind, kinship, species, race, and somehow also more -- exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the translational, transdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational structures of the contemporary humanities: What happens when texts, objects, practices, and concepts are transferred or displaced from one language, tradition, temporality, or form to another? What is readily transposed, what resists relocation, and what precipitate emerges as distorted or new? Drawing on Barbara Cassin's transformative remarks on untranslatability, and the activity of "philosophizing in languages," scholars contributing to The Geschlecht Complex examine these and other durable queries concerning the ontological powers of naming, and do so in the light of recent artistic practices, theoretical innovations, and philosophical incitements. Combining detailed case studies of concrete "category problems" in literature, philosophy, media, cinema, politics, painting, theatre, and the performing arts with a range of indispensable excerpts from canonical texts -- by notable, field-defining thinkers such as Apter, Cassin, Cavell, Derrida, Irigaray, Malabou, and Nancy, among others -- the volume presents "the Geschlecht complex" as a condition to become aware of, and in turn, to companionably underwrite any interpretive endeavor. Historically grounded, yet attuned to the particularities of the present, the Geschlecht complex becomes an invaluable mode for thinking and theorizing while ensconced in the urgent immediacy of pressing concerns, and poised for the inevitable complexities of categorial naming and genre discernment that await in the so often inscrutable, translation-resistant twenty-first century.

Oscar Jansson is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of Graham Greene and the Conditions of 20th Century Literature and articles on modern literature and media, ranging from the aesthetics of national romanticism to affective modes of satire in contemporary fiction. David LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor of more than a dozen books, with several of them from Bloomsbury, including Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor, Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene, The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed, Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, and The Geschlecht Complex: Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology. He studied rhetoric at Berkeley, served as Harvard's Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom, participated in an NEH Institute and the School of Criticism and Theory. He has taught philosophy, rhetoric, and cinema, and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, the New York Public Library, the School of Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt. www.DavidLaRocca.org

As someone who has followed untranslatability for many years, it is with great pleasure that Oscar Jansson and David LaRocca have brought this theme to a point of philosophical sophistication in The Geschlecht Complex-a brilliant, bold, and eccentric work. [...]themselves to a single (but impossibly complex) German word, a range of scholars from different fields of inquiry and analysis have nonetheless produced a collection that signals a new maturity in the approach to untranslatability. In that sense, it may (hopefully) be the first of many such works. This is a collection that bravely attempts to overcome the constraints of traditional scholarship in the hope of generating work that lives up to Apter and Cassin's invocations to 'philosophize with languages'. The very form of the book itself challenges and expands a series of preconceptions on this topic. It is a brave, well-rounded, and seismically significant publication insofar as it exercises what previous scholars have only prescribed and envisioned. * Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Review * Bristling with intellectual energy, The Geschlecht Complex brings together a number of brilliantly original essays and a carefully curated sample of theoretical excerpts in its exploration of the resonances and affordances of a singularly untranslatable notion. The Geschlecht Complex is many things: it is both syllabus and seminar, both a joyful intellectual exchange and a virtuoso homage to the examples of such thinkers/readers as Cassin, Cavell, Apter, and Derrida. Most of all, it is an exuberant performance of the key inspiration driving the thinking of the untranslatable: the conviction that the untranslatable is at once generated and redeemed by passionate ventures of translation-across genres, media, bodies, languages, and disciplines. In all these transpositions, this volume succeeds marvelously. * Pieter Vermeulen, Associate Professor of American and Comparative Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium * Geschlecht by any other name: that multifarious and ultimately untranslatable German word typifying in this volume a complexity and a syndrome alike -- its cultural semantics both vertical for generational kindred and horizontal for genre or kind; lineage on the one hand, typology on the other; now general species or genus, now specified gender. With this book's erudite roundtable, we are invited to the second, collectively-edited installment of a productive -- make that generative -- seminar once convened to rethink the ramifications of such irresolvable inner difference: less as a definitional crux than as a blocked crossing, where impasse becomes surplus when confronted at the disciplinary interface of philology and philosophy, rhetoric and ontology. Giving new reach to trans-theory, the performative yield of category-hesitation in these essays is abundant, subtle, and bracing. * Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, and author of The Deed of Reading: Literature * Writing * Language * Philosophy * The Geschlecht Complex is a rare and undoubtedly important book in that it treats categorization as both problem and necessity for the production of knowledge. Indeed, utilizing and developing the notion of the 'uncategorizable' as an analytical tool, it collects a multitude of contemporary problems into a stereoscopic perspective (albeit in a non-unitary manner and necessarily hesitant of its own limits) on the age-old aesthetic problem of the sublime and the monstrous -- and furthermore, on the ontological consequences of those seemingly impossible categories. * Isak Hylten-Cavallius, Chief Editor, Tidskrift foer litteraturvetenskap/Swedish Journal of Literary Studies, Lund University, Sweden, and Associate Professor of Literary Studies. Linnaeus University, Vaxjoe, Sweden *