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Notes
1 Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 23:3 (2012), p.207.
2 See for instance Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (2000), pp.54–68; David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Michel LeBris, Jean Rouaud, eds, Pour une littérature-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).
3 Following Karen Barad, I use the term ‘intra-action’ which ‘marks an important shift, reopening and refiguring foundational notions of classical ontology such as causality, agency, space, time, matter, discourse, responsibility, and accountability’. (‘Natures Queer Performativity’, Kvinder, Køn og forskning/Women, Gender and Research, 1–2 (2012), p.32).
4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Emily Apter, The Translation Zone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Emily Apter, Against World Literature (London: Verso, 2013).
5 Emily Apter, ‘Theorizing Francophonie’, Comparative Literature Studies, 42:4 (2005), pp.297–311.
6 See Réda Bensmaïa, ‘Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories?’, Research in African Literatures, 30:3 (1999), pp.151–163.
7 Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (2000), pp.54–68 p.55.
8 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London and New York: Verso, 2005), also his Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London and New York: Verso, 1998).
9 David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, p.285.
10 David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, p.4.
11 David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, p.6.
12 David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, p.281 [my emphases].
13 David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, p.283.
14 Emily Apter, Against World Literature, p.178.
15 David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, p.285.
16 Drawing on Jacques Derrida's work, Derek Attridge has for instance forcefully argued that texts are not ‘objects’ but events qua reading, in The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).
17 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p.71.
18 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28:3 (2003), p.829.
19 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p.829.
20 On Bohr's (for Barad crucial) difference to Heisenberg's quantum theory, see her Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp.97–131.
21 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p.813.
22 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p.813.
23 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p.813.
24 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.106.
25 Barad calls ‘spacetimemattering’ an ‘imploded phrase’ that is to signal that ‘space, time, and matter are not simply “there”; rather, they are constituted (and iteratively reconstituted) through the intra-active performances of the world’ (‘Natures Queer Performativity’, pp.49 and 51).
26 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p.817.
27 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p.818.
28 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p.817.
29 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p.817.
30 Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come’, Derrida Today, 3:2 (2010), p.265.
31 My use, thus, differs from e.g. Marie Louise Pratt's as ‘the emergence of a transnational reading public […] made up of people all over the world’ and the consequence that ‘authors can write for this transnational literary public’ (‘Comparative Literature and the Global Languagescapes’, in A Companion to Comparative Literature, eds Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), p.285).
32 Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies. Life at Large (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p.xi. With reference to Barad, Kirby explains that although quantum behaviour ‘in the macroscopic world of human affairs […is] not readily discernible they are nevertheless operative and have sometimes been observed’ (p.4).
33 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p.34.
34 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p.153 [my emphasis].
35 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p.33.
36 Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation. Poésie en Étendue (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), p.42 (all translations are mine).
37 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, pp.159–160.
38 Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’, p.207.
39 See also Leslie Adelson, ‘Against Between: A Manifesto’, in Unpacking Europe, eds Iftikhar Dadi, Salah Hassan, Ken Lum et al. (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2002), pp.244–255.
40 All preceding Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p.34. To view Relation as celebrating global harmony or neglecting strife, power and violence overlooks Glissant's profound concern for historicity, post/colonial injustice and exploitation. The opening to Poetics of Relation makes such concerns evident (see also Apter, Against World Literature, pp.184–186).
41 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p.12.
42 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p.18 [my emphasis].
43 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p.18 [my emphasis].
44 Glissant works with three interlaced images of the world: totalité-monde, échos-monde and chaos-monde, of which totalité-monde is most relevant here, see Poetics of Relation, pp.91–102.
45 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.151.
46 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.140.
47 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, pp.5 and 71.
48 All preceding Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements’, p.261.
49 All preceding Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.4.
50 Jean-Luc Nancy, Sense of the World, p.6. Nancy stresses the duration of this eclipse in Dis-enclosure. The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007) and The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).
51 Jean-Luc Nancy, Sense of the World, p.43. ‘Planetary disaster’ refers to Nancy's diagnosis of an augmenting disastrous glomicity of the planet, and to the dis-aster (echoing Blanchot) as end to any sidereal order of the cosmos.
52 In order to envision the non-totalized totality, Nancy makes reference to quantum philosophy. He states the need to rethink the differentiations of the world according to what ‘one could call a quantum discreteness borrowing from physics the discreteness of material quanta, [which] makes up the world as such, the “finite” world liable to sense’ (p.62). Without wanting to conflate the differences in perspective, the echoes between Nancy's and Barad's (see ‘On Touching’, p.210) concerns are remarkable and would require further exploration than is possible here.
53 Jean-Luc Nancy, Sense of the World, p.152.
54 Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation, p.102.
55 Jean-Luc Nancy, Sense of the World, pp.154–155.
56 Jean-Luc Nancy, Creation of the World, p.37.
57 Jean-Luc Nancy, Creation of the World, p.33.
58 Both Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp.34–35.
59 Karen Barad, ‘Natures Queer Performativity’, p.32.
60 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, pp.161–162.
61 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature. International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (London: Continuum, 2008), pp.140–141.
62 Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation, p.102; on interpellation, see also van der Tuin in this issue.
63 Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation, p.72.
64 See also Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’ for the inseparability of ‘reader’ and ‘read’ (resp. ‘observer’ and ‘observed’, p.815), where she proposes a ‘specifically posthumanist notion of performativity’ (p.808) echoing Nancy's comparution.
65 Both Jean-Luc Nancy, Sense of the World, p.45.
66 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p.46; see also Emily Apter, The Translation Zone, p.87.
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Birgit Mara Kaiser
Birgit Mara Kaiser is assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Trained in sociology and literature in Bochum, London, Madrid and Bielefeld, she received her PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. Her current research spans literatures in English, French and German from the eighteenth to twenty-first century, with special interest in aesthetics, affectivity and subject-formation. She is the author of Figures of Simplicity. Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (SUNY Press, 2011) and editor (with Lorna Burns) of Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze. Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), and Singularity and Transnational Poetics (forthcoming with Routledge), and her work appeared in International Journal for Francophone Studies and Textual Practice. She has also co-founded the Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities Terra Critica (www.terracritica.net). Email: [email protected]