Fractured Narratives: Masculinities, Traumatic Histories and Margins

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Notes

¹Kafka 1910.

²Todd Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews and Trains, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, When we think about technologies of modernization, we are often already thinking within a Eurocentric framing as if modern Europe has existed as some kind of bounded entity in time and space, and as if its boundaries have not always been porous. This encourages us to assume that the concepts and paradigms utilized within the various disciplines emerged from an observation and analysis of the European experience that can subsequently be applied to colonized spaces. This is a view that Todd Presner can help us disrupt within Europe itself.

³For an illuminating discussion of Walter Benjamin's early thought and the intellectual context in which it developed, see Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, London: Routledge, 1998.

⁴Presner, Mobile Modernity, p. 2.

⁵For an understanding of the development of R.W. Connell's thinking that was framed through notions of hegemonic masculinities, see, for instance, R.W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, and Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.

⁶I have argued this in Victor Jeleniewski Seidler, Transforming Masculinities: Men, Cultures, Bodies, Power, Sex and Love, London, New York: Routledge, 2006, and Young Men and Masculinities: Global Cultures and Intimate Lives, London: Zed Books, 2007.

⁷See Victor Jeleniewski Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language and Sexuality, London: Routledge, 1987.

⁸I have explored the ways that the Holocaust histories of my family have shaped the ways I think more easily from the margins as an ‘outsider’, as we learned to identify this term in the late 1950s partly under the influence of Colin Wilson's The Outsider, in Victor Jeleniewski Seidler, Shadows of the Shoah: Jewish Identity and Belonging, Oxford: Berg, 2000.

⁹Daniel Boyarin has done important work in showing how Judaism became framed as ‘other’, and for long periods within Christian Europe as ‘enemy’, through the ways it came to be identified with bodies and sexualities, and so with ‘sins of the flesh’. See Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Judaism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. This raised the questions not only about how the existence of Jews in Europe served to disrupt a discourse of ‘Christian Europe’, but also how Judaism was given a ‘place’ within Christian discourses as a religious tradition that had been ‘superseded’, so no longer able to speak into the present. Once Jews were obliged to live separately in ghettoes in Christian Europe, did this frame them as an ‘internalized colony’, which also helped to set the terms through which Europe was to imagine its relationships with its colonized ‘others’?

¹⁰Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body, New York: Routledge, 1991.

¹¹For some of my early reflections upon the relationships between masculinity and modernity, and so on the possibility of alternative ‘other’ counter-modernities that involve disrupting the radical split between reason and nature which framed a Kantian ethical tradition as well as shaped a dominant white, Christian and European heterosexual masculinity, see Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity.

¹²For a discussion that engages with Freud and Wittgenstein in relation to challenging traditions of European rationalism which have shaped Enlightenment modernities, see Victor Jeleniewski Seidler, Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory, London: Routledge, 1993. I show the ways that Freud thinks across the boundaries of modernity while in some ways tied to its traditions of scientific rationalism, which Wittgenstein, in his later writings, helps to question.

¹³For some helpful discussions of Kafka which place his writings in historical and cultural context, and also engage with themes in his writings, see Ronald Hayman, A Biography of Kafka, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981; Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979; Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, London: Vintage Books, 1980; Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka: On the 10th Anniversary of His Death’ and ‘Max Brod's Book on Kafka’, in Illuminations, trans. from the German by Harry Zohn, London: Fontana, 1980, pp.; Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, trans. from the German by Christopher Middleton, London:, 1974; Pavel Eisner, Franz Kafka and Prague, New York: Golden Griffin Books, 1950; and Marthe Robert, Kafka, Paris: Gallimard, 1968.

¹⁴Hayman, A Biography of Kafka, p. 219.

¹⁵Claire Allfree, ‘Oluwale Is Gone but Never Forgotten’, Metro, 24 March 2009, pp. 26–7 (p. 26).

¹⁶Victor Jeleniewski Seidler, Urban Fears and Global Terrors: Citizenship, Multicultures and Belongings after 7/7, London: Routledge, 2007.

¹⁷Allfree, ‘Oluwale’, p. 26.

¹⁸Allfree, ‘Oluwale’ p. 27.

¹⁹Claire Alfree, ‘Oluwale is Gone but Never Forgotten›, Metro, 24 March 2009, p. 26.

²⁰Claire Alfree, ‘Oluwale is Gone but Never Forgotten›, Metro, 24 March 2009, p. 26.

²¹Nic Dunlop, ‘The End of a Long Wait for Khmer Justice’, Metro, 18 March 2009, p. 14.

²²I have explored this in Victor Jeleniewski Seidler, Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture, London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.

²³For some helpful discussions and conversations with Derrida and Habermas in the wake of the events of 9/11 and the ways that it offers challenges to prevailing forms of social and political theory that are largely set within the terms of a secular rationalism, see Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

²⁴Dunlop, ‘End of a Long Wait’.