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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    Invoking the West: Giorgio Agamben’s “Romantic Ideology” and the Civilizational Transference
    (英語學系, 2014-09-??) Jon Solomon
    Inspired 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.
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    Spectral History: Unsettling Nation Time in "The Last Communist"
    (英語學系, 2013-03-??) Fiona Lee
    "The Last Communist" ("Lelaki Komunis Terakhir") traces the biographical narrative of Chin Peng, the exiled Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Malaya who led the armed uprising against the British during the Malayan Emergency. Going against the grain of official history, the film presents the communist-led uprising as contributing to the anti-colonial nationalist struggle. This essay argues that the film's significance lies not merely in its retrieval of a marginalized perspective of national history. Subverting the conventions of the documentary genre, the film eschews interviews or archival footage of its eponymous subject, withholding him from sight to articulate the figure of the spectral communist. Moreover, the film stages scenes of everyday life as a site for conjuring the past in the present, a method of historical knowledge production that constitutes a translation of time. The figuring of a spectral historical subject, as signaled by a visual absence and the summoning of the past in the present, unsettles the linear, chronological time of national history. In doing so, the film not only presents a critique of the national narrative's ideological project of modernity, but conceives of history as a political act of redefining the historical present.