Amorous Ex/Incursions: Love in Writings of Badiou, Weil, Fromm, and Barthes

My dissertation explores the enabling contributions of love to the practice of ethico-political and cultural critique. Engaging with the work of Alain Badiou, Simone Weil, Erich Fromm, and Roland Barthes, I examine love in terms of the following modalities: waiting, giving, and looking. I place the aforementioned thinkers in dialogue with selected literary and cinematic texts to explicate and interrogate the meaningful possibilities of their discourse on love. In my chapter on Alain Badiou, I discuss his ontology, which I draw upon heavily to set the theoretical parameters of my study. I also discuss the logic of love that he develops in his philosophy. Speaking to the problem of pre-Evental agency that critics of his work identify, I suggest that waiting as attention, as theorized by Simone Weil, might be the closest form of agency that a pre-Evental (amorous) being can experience. In my discussion of Erich Fromm, I reevaluate his “art of loving” within the constellation of late capitalism. Reading his work through a Lacanian lens, I explore the utility of his prescriptions by examining Chuck Palahniuk’s controversial novel Fight Club. In my chapter on Roland Barthes, I theorize the possibility of cinematic looking that does not depend on the antagonism inherent in the binaries masculine/ feminine and (Gazing) spectator/ (to-be-looked-at) image. Towards this objective, I propose the “amorous look,” a mode of viewing occasioned by cinematic punctual encounters, that I contend is beyond the domain of desire and perversion. I deploy the “amorous look” as I reflect on Aureus Solito’s film Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Olivares (The Blossoming of Maximo Olivares) and its representations of love and waiting.

Death Threat Letters: Allegories of American Authorship in the Age of Terrorism

This dissertation examines novels that use terrorism to allegorize the threatened position of the literary author in contemporary culture. Allegory is a term that has been differently understood over time, but which has consistently been used by writers to articulate and construct their roles as authors. In the novels I look at, the terrorist challenge to authorship results in multiple deployments of allegory, each differently illustrating the way that allegory is used and authorship constructed in the contemporary American novel. Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991), first puts terrorists and authors in an oppositional pairing. The terrorist’s ability to traffic in spectacle is presented as indicative of the author’s fading importance in contemporary culture and it is one way that terrorism allegorizes threats to authorship. In Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993), the allegorical pairing is between the text of the novel and outside texts – newspaper reports, legal cases, etc. – that the novel references and adapts in order to bolster its own narrative authority. Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (1999) pairs the story of an imprisoned hostage, craving a single book, with employees of a tech firm who are creating interactive, virtual reality artworks. Focusing on the reader’s experience, Powers’s novel posits a form of authorship that the reader can take into consideration, but which does not seek to control the experience of the text. Finally, I look at two of Paul Auster’s twenty-first century novels, Travels in the Scriptorium (2007) and Man in the Dark (2008), to suggest that the relationship between representations of authors and terrorists changed after 9/11. Auster’s author-figures forward an ethics of authorship whereby novels can use narrative to buffer readers against the portrayal of violent acts in a culture that is suffused with traumatizing imagery.