Russell Smith | The Australian National University (original) (raw)

Papers by Russell Smith

Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art, 2017

Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 2021

This essay examines the concepts of life and afterlife as they appear across Beckett's trilogy, t... more This essay examines the concepts of life and afterlife as they appear across Beckett's trilogy, through focussing on representations of the act of burial, an act which draws attention to a caesura between biotic and abiotic conceptions of both life and afterlife. As the worlds of the trilogy become progressively less biotic, The Unnamable might be thought of as a laboratory in which the 'lives' of its characters are subjected to various biological experiments, experiments which suggest that narrative fiction, like the act of burial, is a kind of prophylactic against the fundamental processual nature of biotic life.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2021

Enunciation refers to the act of making a spoken or written statement, as opposed to the content ... more Enunciation refers to the act of making a spoken or written statement, as opposed to the content of the statement. It is associated with the work of French linguist Émile Benveniste, whose Problems in General Linguistics (1966) argued that formalist and structuralist accounts of language fail to pay sufficient attention to the fact that many of the core elements of any language, such as the pronouns “I” and “you,” are entirely dependent for their function on the unique circumstances in which they are enunciated. Enunciation thus describes the process by which a speaker or writer takes up the position of a linguistic subject. Benveniste further argued that all acts of language use are fundamentally dialogical in nature, although the individual acts of speaking and listening, writing and reading may be widely separated in place and time. These questions played a pivotal role in the shift, both in literary theory and in the human sciences more broadly, from structuralism to poststructuralism through the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This involved a shift from the study of language as a signifying system, to the study of discourse as the range of different processes by which individual acts of speaking and writing, listening and reading, are framed in advance by formal and informal rules and conventions. Every actual instance of language use is inseparable from its enunciative situation, and this entails attention to the questions of who is speaking, to whom, and why? As developed in different ways by theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, the linguistics of enunciation would raise profound questions about the role of language in the formation of subjectivity and in the discursive operation of power.

Nineteenth Century Contexts, 2019

Written in the wake of the Luddite protests, Frankenstein has long been recognised as a fable of ... more Written in the wake of the Luddite protests, Frankenstein has long been recognised as a fable of the social impacts of technological modernity. Here I examine the career of a real-life Victor Frankenstein, the Scottish physician Andrew Ure. On 4 November 1818, Ure performed a series of galvanic experiments at Glasgow University on the body of Matthew Clydesdale, hanged for murder an hour earlier. According to Ure’s lurid account in the 1819 Quarterly Journal of Science, the dead man resumed breathing, opened his eyes and appeared to gesture towards the terrified spectators. Ure subsequently became, along with Charles Babbage, one of the principal theorists of the industrial revolution. Whereas Babbage was concerned with the technical aspects of automation, Ure was preoccupied with the machine’s capacity to discipline the labouring body. Ure’s definition of ‘AUTOMATIC’ in his Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines underlines his theorisation of the link between body and machine:

AUTOMATIC: A term used to designate such economic arts as are carried on by self-acting machinery. The word is employed by the physiologist to express involuntary motions.

As we enter the fourth industrial revolution, I wish to examine Frankenstein’s relationship with the first, and its reconceptualization of the living body as matter that can be animated by forces such as electricity, and can thus be heightened, sustained, managed and disciplined – in a word, engineered – in the service of capitalist production.

Journal of Beckett Studies, 2017

This paper offers a historically contextualized reading of what is perhaps the most explicit enga... more This paper offers a historically contextualized reading of what is perhaps the most explicit engagement with radical politics in Beckett's work, the encounter in The End (1946), Beckett's first piece of postwar fiction, between the narrator, a homeless beggar, and a Marxist orator who abuses him as a ‘leftover’ and denounces the charity of the passers-by as a ‘crime’. With reference to Beckett's later rejection of existentialist interpretations of his work with the words ‘I'm no intellectual. All I am is feeling (sensibilité)’, and Theodor Adorno's contemporaneous diagnosis in Minima Moralia (1944–1947) of the ‘barbarism’ of cultural criticism's relentless demand to unmask the material relations enfolded in the notion of sensibility, this paper reads this scene as a parody of the callously unsentimental rhetoric of the Parti Communiste Français and the Sartrean existentialist humanism that was the official philosophy of de Gaulle's Fourth Republic. In particular, the orator's castigation of the protagonist as a leftover (un déchet) can be read as part of a long tradition of Marxist excoriations of the lumpenproletariat—the amorphous class of ne'er-do-wells to which so many of Beckett's postwar protagonists belong—that has a precise historical origin in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire and its denunciation of the role of la bohème, the ‘scum, offal, refuse of all classes’, in the 1851 counter-revolutionary coup d’état of Louis-Bonaparte. Before 1851, however, the amorphous mass of the destitute and homeless was capable of serving as a figure of revolutionary potential, as Walter Benjamin's study of Baudelaire shows, where it was the ragpicker's ‘obscure state of revolt against society’ rather than the optimism of utopian theorists that inspired Baudelaire to fight on the barricades in the failed uprising of 1848. In its presentation of a confrontation between the callous optimism of political futurity and the contemporary extremes of human suffering, The End stakes an allegiance with the war's ‘leftovers’ that is out of step with the official radical politics of the time.

Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 2017

The narrator's sudden access of inexplicable weeping in First Love can be read as a parodic rewri... more The narrator's sudden access of inexplicable weeping in First Love can be read as a parodic rewriting of the famous " Les intermittences du coeur " section of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, which Beckett called " perhaps the greatest passage that Proust ever wrote. " Beckett's restaging of involuntary memory emphatically rejects its potential as an entry point to " time regained " ; instead, for Beckett's narrator, neither the stimulus for the emotion nor the involuntary memory associated with it can be known, because they belong, not to the world of Beckett's protagonist, but to the alien intertextual world of Proust's novel.

Affirmations: Of the Modern, 2016

In this essay I use Frankenstein as a lens through which to read a notable recent novel, Julia Le... more In this essay I use Frankenstein as a lens through which to read a notable recent novel, Julia Leigh’s The Hunter, which raises questions about the relation between modernity, extinction and sexual difference. In The Hunter a professional bounty-hunter, known only as M, is employed by a shadowy multinational biotech company to venture into the wilderness of Tasmania’s central plateau to track down and kill the last surviving Tasmanian tiger, an animal long thought to be extinct, in order to harvest its genetic material for biological weapons. However, just as Shelley’s presentation of the creature as a sympathetic figure complicates any didactic reading of Frankenstein as cautionary tale against scientific hubris, so too, The Hunter studiously avoids reduction to a straightforward ecological fable. Indeed, the most compelling aspect of Leigh’s novel is not the human drama of M’s interactions with the Armstrong family, but its vivid depiction of his relinquishment of human attachments in a kind of becoming-animal that is an intrinsic element of his success as a hunter. Both novels suggest queer models of survival and futurity beyond an anthropocentric ethics grounded in sexual difference.

Journal of Medical Humanities, 2016

In a 1961 interview, Beckett warded off philosophical interpretations of his work: ‘I’m no intell... more In a 1961 interview, Beckett warded off philosophical interpretations of his work: ‘I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling’. Despite the emotional intensity of Beckett’s post-war writing, Beckett criticism has tended to ignore this claim, preferring the kinds of philosophical readings that Beckett here rejects. In particular, Beckett criticism underestimates the element of rage in his work. This paper argues that Beckett’s post-war breakthrough is enabled by a radical reconsideration of the nature of feeling and of rage in particular. It involves the rejection of the idea of rage as pathological and the embrace of a positive conception of rage as drive or compulsion, a locus of energy and even pleasure.

This paper reads the ‘Moran’ section of Molloy as a kind of ‘rage fable’, drawing on the ancient Greek concept of thymos, of anger as a virtue. It draws on Alfred Adler’s theory of the ‘masculine protest’, with which Beckett was familiar from his extensive note-taking on Adler in 1934-5, and Sianne Ngai’s discussion of the distinction between irritation and rage. According to this reading, Moran’s report charts a narrative of thymotic liberation from the irritations of servitude, prefiguring the Unnamable’s abandonment to impersonal affective intensities. It ends by suggesting that the prose of the Trilogy might be better understood, not as a ‘syntax of weakness’ but as a ‘syntax of rage’, a stylistic correlative of the imperious drive of thymos. We might then begin to understand the Trilogy as the epic of a heroic, impersonal, implacable and liberated rage.
LINK: http://rdcu.be/mH1N

A central preoccupation of How It Is is the act of bearing witness: "I say it as I hear it." Read... more A central preoccupation of How It Is is the act of bearing witness: "I say it as I hear it." Readings of the novel turn on whether the text ultimately bears witness to the presence of alterity or cancels it in a final claim of absolute aesthetic autonomy. Here I draw out the text's relationship to two contrasting paradigms of witnessing: the theological paradigm exemplified by Dante's Comedy and the secular paradigm formulated by Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz. I argue that the text's paratactic structure, pronominal indeterminacy and ambiguous negations bear out Agamben's secular paradigm of bearing witness.