Paper Abstracts

Friday 11th May

Panel One – ‘Spectres of the Self’

Jared Holley (University of Cambridge)

Rêveries du promenaire epicure: Spectres of the Self in Rousseau’s Rêveries

This paper argues that the Rêveries du promenaire solitaire constitutes the written record of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Epicurean practice of happiness. Like Epicurus, Rousseau understood happiness as a state of mental tranquilité dependent upon a reorientation of one’s temporal perspective. With reference to Rousseau’s reading of both John Locke and the Abbé de Condillac, the paper supplements this understanding by demonstrating, first, that Rousseau had taken on Locke’s updated Epicurean understanding of tranquilité as a negative state of pleasure defined by the absence of the mental pain of inquiètude and, second, that Rousseau also followed Locke’s updated Epicurean understanding of selfhood as essentially constituted by the continuity of consciousness over time. As such, the self that experiences the present instant is itself dependent upon the memory of past instances of experience. By acknowledging Rousseau’s reading of Montaigne’s ‘On Solitude’, the paper demonstrates that Rousseau understood happiness precisely as a memorial practice, in which present pleasure was secured by the active recollection of memories of pleasures past. These historical comparisons provide the foundation for the exploration of some of the discussions of happiness in Rousseau’s later writings, an exploration that permits the conclusion that Rousseau sought to gradually refine his pleasant memories through the very act of writing itself. Thus, Rousseau is seen to have followed the Epicurean practice of cultivating his capacity to deploy past pleasure to secure present happiness, rather than accepting Montaigne’s more Stoic-inspired view of present happiness as threatened by the hauntings of ambivalent spectres of the self.

Zoe Roth (King’s College London)

‘An Impossible Death: Anachronism, Embodiment and the Spectrum of Sensation in Maurice Blanchot’s L’Instant de ma mort’

On the 20^th July 1994, Maurice Blanchot, in a letter to his friend Jacques Derrida, declared that ‘[i]l y a cinquante ans, je connus le bonheur d’être presque fusillé’ (Derrida 1998). Blanchot’s récit of the same year, L’Instant de ma mort, takes its allegorical premise from this enigmatic allusion to Blanchot’s near execution by a German firing squad in 1944. While scholars like Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe foreground the testimonial, historical and philosophical aspects of the text, this paper will investigate the relationship between the embodied experience of time and narrative form, specifically the way the temporal continuum between event and narration is experienced as a feeling of lightness. This sensation anchors the two narrative selves along an embodied spectrum, rather than in diametrical opposition.

The narrative voice in the text vacillates between two selves and their analogous points in time: the older, first-person, present tense je, and the younger, third-person, past tense il. Moving counter-intuitively against the teleological trajectory of historical time, the older je precedes the younger, qualifying the order of events. I term this disjunctive temporality ‘anachronism’; derived from the Greek compound anachronismos, meaning ‘late in time’ (OED), it signifies both a chronological error and a deliberate stylistic fallacy. Anachronism is thus the state of being ‘out of date’ that characterizes the older self’s constant return to the moment of his death, as well as the formal oscillation between je and il. The effect of these two times – life and death, anteriority and posteriority – rubbing against each other is a sensation of lightness the two selves experience simultaneously, bridging past and present in an embodied spectrum of eternity, and continually deferring the event of death that would signify the end of time.

Panel Two – ‘Political Spectra’

Adrian May (University of Cambridge)

‘From Spectres of Marx to a Spectrum of Marx’

After the “années d’hiver” of the 1980’s and the backlash against Marxism, Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx in 1993 suggested a return of left wing political thought to France, whilst the mass strike waves in ’95 signalled a return to practice. This return to Marx has only accelerated after the recent financial crisis, with Alain Badiou organising three international conferences around L’Idée du communisme to encourage a collective rethinking radical left possibilities. This paper wishes to plot key contemporary French thinkers associated with these conferences, and the publisher Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, onto the political spectrum to demonstrate some different positions of new French left wing thought. Dropping the ‘ism’ from ‘communism’, Jean-Luc Nancy’s text on the intangibly shared commun can barely be placed on any spectrum at all, remaining a spectral presence. Jacques Rancière rallies to Badiou’s request to rethink communism, but this subsequently appears more of a sleight of hand – his argument seems little different to his usual demand for a more active, emancipatory democracy. Badiou himself has been described as a ‘para-marxist’, and his approach could be described as an aesthetic way of focusing critical attention than a considered political strategy. Lastly, this paper wishes to pay homage to the recently deceased Daniel Bensaïd, who over the last 20 years undertook an inventive and productive rethinking of Marxism, emphasising pluralistic democratic values and reconsidering the role of private property, re-reading Walter Benjamin’s messianism along the way.

Eva-Maria Hochhauser (University of Innsbruck)

Breaking the (spot‐)light: The political spectrum of France in the 21st century

Thinking about contemporary political spectra and especially the spectrum of France, one might at first sight ask: How can we characterize the French party system as a spectrum remembering the highly antagonistic and bipolar presidential elections of 2007? What might look as a clear‐cut confrontation between two camps or possible irreconcilable ends of a spectrum, red (left) and blue (right), gets more complex when taking a second look. Are Socialists and Conservatives only representing a pale version of red and blue without any recognizable border and differences? Are they actually just offering the voters a show where any colorful difference is put aside and a colourless spotlight is blinding the voters? Thus, do the voters nowadays need a prism to break this spotlight in order to let the colorful spectrum of the French party system resurface with its numerous but often neglected small parties and their relationships with the two global players? All these questions first asked when thinking about the French political spectrum, lead to one main puzzle: Does “the spectrum” as analytic category help us to overcome the nowadays contested but still often used dichotomy between left and right and to shed new light on the complex relationships between the French political parties? The paper aims to answer this question by analyzing the two last presidential elections under a spectral perspective.