Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience
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What if our existence is a product of its interruptions? What if the words that structure our lives are themselves governed by the periods and commas that bring them to a close, or our images by the cinematic cuts that mark them off? Are we, like Chekhov's clerk, who dreams of being pursued by angry exclamation marks, or Scorsese's Jake LaMotta, bloodied by one violently edited fight after another, the products of punctuation--or as Peter Szendy asks us to think of it, punchuation?
Of Stigmatology elaborates for the first time a general theory of punctuation. Beginning with punctuation marks in the common sense, Peter Szendy goes on to trace the effects of punctuation more broadly, arguing that looking and hearing are not passive acts of reception, but themselves punctuate the images and sounds they take in. Szendy reads an astonishing range of texts and traditions, from medical auscultation to literature (Chekhov, Sterne, Kafka), philosophy (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and film (Raging Bull, The Trial, Fight Club). Repeatedly, what Szendy finds in these works is a punctuation that marks experience itself, that seeks (and ultimately fails) to bind the subject to itself. This is the stigmatology of the punctuation mark on the page that structures texts from ancient to digital, as well as the punchuation of experience, as though at the hands of a boxer.Peter Szendy is David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University and musicological advisor for the concert programs at the Paris Philharmony. He has taught in the Philosophy Department at the University of Paris Nanterre and as Visiting Professor in Princeton and NYU. He has been the senior editor of the journal and book series published by Ircam. He is the author of: Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience (Fordham University Press, 2018); All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (Fordham University Press, 2016); Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies (Fordham University Press, 2015); Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World (with a foreword by Samuel Weber, Fordham University Press, 2015); Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions (Fordham University Press, 2013); Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox (Fordham University Press, 2012); Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville (Fordham University Press, 2009); Listen: A History of Our Ears (with a foreword by Jean-Luc Nancy, Fordham University Press, 2007). Jan Plug (Translator)
Jan Plug is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.
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