Books by Jeffrey Champlin
The Technological Introject explores the futures opened up across the humanities and social scien... more The Technological Introject explores the futures opened up across the humanities and social sciences by the influential media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Joining the German tradition of media studies and systems theory to the Franco-American theoretical tradition marked by poststructuralism, Kittler’s work has redrawn the boundaries of disciplines and of scholarly traditions.
The contributors position Kittler in relation to Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, discourse analysis, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Ultimately, the book shows the continuing relevance of the often uncomfortable questions Kittler opened up about the cultural production and its technological entanglements.
ed. Jeffrey Champlin, and Antje Pfannkuchen, Afterword by Avital Ronell
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_The Making of a Terrorist: On Classic German Rogues_ reads the most violent scenes of three cano... more _The Making of a Terrorist: On Classic German Rogues_ reads the most violent scenes of three canonical texts of Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist in the context of English and French social contract theory. I argue that Götz von Berlichingen, Die Räuber, and Michael Kohlhaas gesture to surprising transformations of the body politic in the wake of extreme violence rather than the expected alternatives of reaction or revolution. I start from the promise of the social contract tradition as it develops from Hobbes to Rousseau, but show that the mechanism for constituting government through the reason of the Enlightenment harbors a potentially totalitarian threat. In contrast, literary texts around 1800 show that the language of those excluded from politics harbors a productive obscurity that compels power to adapt to new historical trajectories. Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist demonstrate how the violence of the terrorist compromises structures of political representation. In so doing, this violence, regardless or even in spite of its supposed intention, opens history to unexpected shifts that appear in the guise of feminine language– whether through Götz von Berlichingen’s wife Elisabeth, Karl Moor's beloved Amalia, or the fortune teller in _Michael Kohlhaas_.
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Pushing the thought of extreme violence to its asserted limit, contributors investigate a problem... more Pushing the thought of extreme violence to its asserted limit, contributors investigate a problem that is, in principle, impossible: the founding disjunction of terror and form. This inquiry involves a re-reading of terror's key-albeit inadvertent-role as a motivator of art, politics, and ontology that is attuned to the fragility of attempts to inscribe its destructive threat. Including contributions from: Avital Ronell, Jeffrey Champlin, Larry Rickels, John Hamilton, Peter Banki, Hannes Charen, Jeremy Fernando, Roger Berkowitz, Shireen Patell, Henry Sussman, and Thomas Keenan.
“Terror and the Roots of Poetics speaks to some of the most pressing concerns in aesthetic and political theory today. Brilliantly edited by Jeffrey Champlin, the book assembles a stunning constellation of insightful essays by a number of leading contemporary critical theorists. Reading the generative poetic force of terrorism against the grain—without thereby falling into revisionist strategies of legitimization or succumbing to a transfiguration of violence—this volume helps us to reconceptualize the constitutive antagonism of annihilating force and onto-poetic form. Not since the early Walter Benjamin’s remarkably nuanced essays on the destructive character and on the idea of a so-called critique of violence have such issues been taken up with similar thoughtfulness and circumspection.”
--Gerhard Richter, Brown University, author of Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics
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Papers by Jeffrey Champlin
In: Teaching Representations of the French Revolution, ed. Julia Douthwaite et al. New York: Modern Language Association Book Publications Program, 69-77., 2019
Eminently universal in their announced jurisdiction, human rights have no proper location. Yet th... more Eminently universal in their announced jurisdiction, human rights have no proper location. Yet they are always received in a particular place and time, and, as Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine say, this is where the problem—or the progress—starts. Teaching the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in an interdisciplinary and global setting, I have found that an attention to language, both thematically and in the practice of writing, offers unique resources for students to confront this tension between the ideal and its instantiation. Creative linguistic engagement both promotes critical reflection on the origin of rights and encourages students to see themselves in relation to the mutability of these rights.
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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein exchanges an assurance of mere perpetuation for a broken vision ... more Mary Shelley's Frankenstein exchanges an assurance of mere perpetuation for a broken vision of a new world. In return for the creature's pledge to leave Europe, his creator agrees to construct a female counterpart. Yet specters of doom later invade his laboratory and lead him to denounce his plan. In this article, I take a step back in order to rise above the critical extremes of resignation and revolution. During the encounter of Frankenstein and the monster in the Alps, the creature's body holds up narratives of social integration. This very impasse, however, gives rise to a promise that spurs new temporal structures.
The creature's account of the education that made him a thinking being offers a vision of recognition that has inspired progressive readings of the novel since the 1970s. Yet how are we to reconcile this moment of universal communication with the novel's continued insistence on the creature's inassimilable violence which results and originates from his appearance? Scholars of Frankenstein that draw on the work of Jacques Lacan articulate the structural challenge of the creature with particular clarity. By holding him before our eyes as rational and repulsive, they turn our attention to the faults of a society that cannot accept the uniquely excluded other. I begin this article by recalling the manner in which Mladen Dolar links the creature's autobiographical narration to his excluded position. I also suggest that this interpretation of Frankenstein illuminates a broader trend within contemporary theory that I term "body structuralism." Although appropriately anchored to the body, this approach narrows the repertoire of narratives that might respond to injustice.
Rather than stopping with the creature's autobiography and accepting Dolar's conclusion of structural 'oscillation,' I move to a second narrative scene at the end of volume II. There, when the creature tells a story of a world to come, Frankenstein does more than just keep the outsider before our eyes. Instead, the promise the monster makes offers not just another narrative, but another mode of narration that highlights its own difficult preconditions. Ultimately, taking on the promise to the monster reveals how one can be granted a place in the future without first being acknowledged to have a place in the present.
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“Natality” has become one of the most central concepts in contemporary work on Arendt and her uni... more “Natality” has become one of the most central concepts in contemporary work on Arendt and her unique renegotiation of ideas of freedom and possibility. Readers of the Denktagebuch might hope for more evidence of the concept’s development, but she uses the term only once in the years leading up to her major deployment of it in The Human Condition. The puzzling, even obscure, presentation of the term in the Denktagebuch challenges interpretive protocols that depend on a linear development. Nonetheless, the entry deserves attention because it shows Arendt transforming a political metaphysics of the body through an alternative conception of corporeality. Maintaining attention to the clash of language and ontology, Arendt shows that the body bears a specifically earthly form of freedom.
In: Berkowitz, Roger, Ian Storey: Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch, Fordham University Press, 2017.
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Germanic Review , Jul 2013
Hannah Arendt introduces “natality” as a conceptual moment when one is born into the political as... more Hannah Arendt introduces “natality” as a conceptual moment when one is born into the political as the sphere where acting together can create the truly unexpected. I argue that this new conception of freedom in The Human Condition draws its strength from a philosophical and rhetorical transformation of the question of the definition of man in theology and the natural sciences. I follow the lead of scholars who highlight Arendt's relation to Heidegger and Augustine, but my method of close reading—I offer the first examination of each appearance of the term “natality” in The Human Condition—leads me to show how Arendt's engagement with philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen opens the space for alternative conceptions of freedom. The figurative and corporeal insistence of her writing, enacted in an embrace of the materiality of language, not only indicates liberation from the strictures of the empirical (as one expects from a philosophical concept) but also demonstrates ways in which the unexpected can arise both in this sphere of freedom and as a fundamental shift of this sphere.
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German Quarterly , 2012
Examining Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas in terms of terrorism, I focus on a subset of critics... more Examining Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas in terms of terrorism, I focus on a subset of critics who move beyond the debate over how to categorize Kohlhaas's violence through its means or ends, and instead point to moments of his attacks that exceed even the explanation he offers. Following this excessive violence through the framing devices of Kohlhaas's manifestos allows me to describe terrorism as an attack not only on specific people and things but on political representation itself. Reading the novella alongside Hannah Arendt's late work On Violence then reveals that it takes a specific narrative stand on this representational attack by describing the historical shift that opens when the people question their identification with the sovereign, without replacing him with either the rebel challenger or a legitimate successor.
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Ökonomie des Opfers. Literatur im Zeichen des Selbstmords , 2014
Sarah Kanes 4.48 Psychosis übt einen viszeralen Sog aus, das Stück bettelt mit der Stimme eines a... more Sarah Kanes 4.48 Psychosis übt einen viszeralen Sog aus, das Stück bettelt mit der Stimme eines abjekten Subjekts um unser Gehör. In der Liebe enttäuscht, verfolgt vom medizinischen Diskurs, verkündet die Protagonistin des Dramas: »At 4:48 / when desperation visits / I shall hang myself.«1 In der Reinheit ihres Anspruchs trägt uns ihre Stimme an die Grenze von Wissen und Sprache, an einen Ort, wo, sobald wir mit dem Herzen zuhören, der Drang zu verstehen nachgibt und uns jede interpretatorische Sicherheit entgleitet. Wie Kafkas Landarzt laufen wir Gefahr, ins Sterbebett der Patientin gezerrt zu werden und uns von ihrer pathetischen Sprache anstecken zu lassen. Wir können uns für den Moment dem dringlichen Eindruck, dass wir unfähig sind zu helfen, nicht entziehen und sind doch gleichzeitig der Hermeneutik verpflichtet, die uns auf eine Diagnose zusteuern lässt. 4.48 Psychosis ist nicht einmal zwei Jahrzehnte alt und bisher selten im literaturwissenschaftlichen Kontext anerkannt worden. Eine Lektüre, die sowohl empathisch als auch analytisch die Stimme des Dramas im Spannungsfeld von literaturhistorischen, rhetorischen und philosophischen Traditionen hallen lässt, verspricht einen ersten Schritt in Richtung literaturwissenschaftlicher Würdigung.
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Eichendorff's novella Durande Castle (1837) follows Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810) in its accou... more Eichendorff's novella Durande Castle (1837) follows Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810) in its account of a character who follows a specific path from careful obedience within a series of legal appeals to a wild and illegal turn to violence. Yet while the final pages of Kleist’s novella leave open questions of law and authority that have inspired a long critical debate, Eichendorff’s text seems to end with a simple moral. Taking this moral, which resonates both as a warning and reading instruction, as my guide, I read the threat of the "wild animal" (wilde Tier) as the mobilization of an important motif from Michael Kohlhaas that both specifies Eichendorff’s thematic appropriation and at the same time resists his apparently successful effort to domesticate Kleist. Picking up on the print run of the Kohlhaas stereotype in this manner allows us to measure the impact of its theme on apparently conservative protocols of literary form, opening both a specific additional perspective on Eichendorff’s Kleistian inheritance and casting new light on the lines of opposition that texts in general face from their apparently docile precursors.
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In one of the most audacious yet widely accepted incursions of philosophy into the literary field... more In one of the most audacious yet widely accepted incursions of philosophy into the literary field, a long line of Faust criticism insists on an analogy between the role of negation in Goethe’s drama and in the first masterpiece of the great dialectician Hegel. In this assessment, repeated by such eminent thinkers as Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Karl Löwith, Faust travels through ever-wider fields of activity that parallel the step-by-step development familiar to readers of the Phänomenologie des Geistes.1 Faust’s ascension to heaven at the end of Faust II would indicate a divine blessing of this journey that marks the successful Bildung of a subject who finally finds himself. In this article I argue that the interpretive logic of this school of Faust criticism has its unacknowledged model in Hegel’s own citation of the drama in the Phänomenologie des Geistes. Engaging Hegel’s appropriation thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of its role in the drama’s reception history. At the same time, the very process of explicating this model reveals an important contrast between the type of negation staged in Faust, which leaves its victims exposed, and the type described in the Phänomenologie, which processes the injuries of spirit as stages in the emergence of a reflective subject.
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Terror and the Roots of Poetics, 2013
Rainer Maria Rilke has the highest hopes for works of art, both in their perfection and their com... more Rainer Maria Rilke has the highest hopes for works of art, both in their perfection and their commitment to disjunctive ruin. While critics have traditionally described his writing in terms of a bridge from material fragmentation to triumphant aesthetic totality, the refusal of these two registers to align once and for all seems to account for a large part of the fascination that his work continues to inspire. In this context, Rilke’s use of ekphrasis does not simply enable a poetic victory in which ne art comes to life, but offers a specific form of aesthetic reflection that opens doubling valences. By moving from the ancient to the modern, from the “Torso” to Cézanne, and from Bild to Bildung, this article examines Rilke’s endeavor to expand his perception through art in order to accommodate specific fragmented and repulsive objects. Working with a phrase in one of his letters on Cézanne that urges a specic way of seeing “im Schrecklichen,” I propose that Rilke does in a sense teach us to see the terrible, but that he does so not by finding a broader sense of being that unifies all things that exist, but by exposing perception to terror as non-unity that precedes aesthetic coherence.
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Book Reviews by Jeffrey Champlin
German Studies Review (October 2012)
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Goethe Yearbook (2012)
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Modern Language Notes, Apr 2012
Peter-André Alt's Ästhetik des Bösen begins with a debate within Hegel regarding the appropriaten... more Peter-André Alt's Ästhetik des Bösen begins with a debate within Hegel regarding the appropriateness of evil as the object of aesthetic study. On the one hand, the philosopher of the end of art programmatically asserts the irrelevance of "das Böse als solches" in his Lectures on Aesthetics, while on the other hand, he continually addresses specific instances of evil in literature as celebrated by the Early Romantics. Alt offers a program which makes up for Hegel's theoretical and systematic failure, arguing that around 1800 evil disappears as an identifiable figure in the outside world governed by the divine and reappears obscurely within mortal man. Literature, in response, draws on new forms to make evil appear in the context of its post-enlightenment withdrawal.
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Kleist Jahrbuch , 2012
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Books by Jeffrey Champlin
The contributors position Kittler in relation to Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, discourse analysis, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Ultimately, the book shows the continuing relevance of the often uncomfortable questions Kittler opened up about the cultural production and its technological entanglements.
ed. Jeffrey Champlin, and Antje Pfannkuchen, Afterword by Avital Ronell
“Terror and the Roots of Poetics speaks to some of the most pressing concerns in aesthetic and political theory today. Brilliantly edited by Jeffrey Champlin, the book assembles a stunning constellation of insightful essays by a number of leading contemporary critical theorists. Reading the generative poetic force of terrorism against the grain—without thereby falling into revisionist strategies of legitimization or succumbing to a transfiguration of violence—this volume helps us to reconceptualize the constitutive antagonism of annihilating force and onto-poetic form. Not since the early Walter Benjamin’s remarkably nuanced essays on the destructive character and on the idea of a so-called critique of violence have such issues been taken up with similar thoughtfulness and circumspection.”
--Gerhard Richter, Brown University, author of Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics
Papers by Jeffrey Champlin
The creature's account of the education that made him a thinking being offers a vision of recognition that has inspired progressive readings of the novel since the 1970s. Yet how are we to reconcile this moment of universal communication with the novel's continued insistence on the creature's inassimilable violence which results and originates from his appearance? Scholars of Frankenstein that draw on the work of Jacques Lacan articulate the structural challenge of the creature with particular clarity. By holding him before our eyes as rational and repulsive, they turn our attention to the faults of a society that cannot accept the uniquely excluded other. I begin this article by recalling the manner in which Mladen Dolar links the creature's autobiographical narration to his excluded position. I also suggest that this interpretation of Frankenstein illuminates a broader trend within contemporary theory that I term "body structuralism." Although appropriately anchored to the body, this approach narrows the repertoire of narratives that might respond to injustice.
Rather than stopping with the creature's autobiography and accepting Dolar's conclusion of structural 'oscillation,' I move to a second narrative scene at the end of volume II. There, when the creature tells a story of a world to come, Frankenstein does more than just keep the outsider before our eyes. Instead, the promise the monster makes offers not just another narrative, but another mode of narration that highlights its own difficult preconditions. Ultimately, taking on the promise to the monster reveals how one can be granted a place in the future without first being acknowledged to have a place in the present.
In: Berkowitz, Roger, Ian Storey: Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch, Fordham University Press, 2017.
Book Reviews by Jeffrey Champlin
The contributors position Kittler in relation to Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, discourse analysis, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Ultimately, the book shows the continuing relevance of the often uncomfortable questions Kittler opened up about the cultural production and its technological entanglements.
ed. Jeffrey Champlin, and Antje Pfannkuchen, Afterword by Avital Ronell
“Terror and the Roots of Poetics speaks to some of the most pressing concerns in aesthetic and political theory today. Brilliantly edited by Jeffrey Champlin, the book assembles a stunning constellation of insightful essays by a number of leading contemporary critical theorists. Reading the generative poetic force of terrorism against the grain—without thereby falling into revisionist strategies of legitimization or succumbing to a transfiguration of violence—this volume helps us to reconceptualize the constitutive antagonism of annihilating force and onto-poetic form. Not since the early Walter Benjamin’s remarkably nuanced essays on the destructive character and on the idea of a so-called critique of violence have such issues been taken up with similar thoughtfulness and circumspection.”
--Gerhard Richter, Brown University, author of Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics
The creature's account of the education that made him a thinking being offers a vision of recognition that has inspired progressive readings of the novel since the 1970s. Yet how are we to reconcile this moment of universal communication with the novel's continued insistence on the creature's inassimilable violence which results and originates from his appearance? Scholars of Frankenstein that draw on the work of Jacques Lacan articulate the structural challenge of the creature with particular clarity. By holding him before our eyes as rational and repulsive, they turn our attention to the faults of a society that cannot accept the uniquely excluded other. I begin this article by recalling the manner in which Mladen Dolar links the creature's autobiographical narration to his excluded position. I also suggest that this interpretation of Frankenstein illuminates a broader trend within contemporary theory that I term "body structuralism." Although appropriately anchored to the body, this approach narrows the repertoire of narratives that might respond to injustice.
Rather than stopping with the creature's autobiography and accepting Dolar's conclusion of structural 'oscillation,' I move to a second narrative scene at the end of volume II. There, when the creature tells a story of a world to come, Frankenstein does more than just keep the outsider before our eyes. Instead, the promise the monster makes offers not just another narrative, but another mode of narration that highlights its own difficult preconditions. Ultimately, taking on the promise to the monster reveals how one can be granted a place in the future without first being acknowledged to have a place in the present.
In: Berkowitz, Roger, Ian Storey: Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch, Fordham University Press, 2017.