艾薩卡•丹尼森 (Isak Dinesen) 的回憶錄《遠離非洲》(Out of Africa) 記載了她在英屬非洲殖民地──肯亞停留長達 17 年的心路歷程。在居留肯亞期間，丹尼森經營農場，並嘗試融入當地生活。然而，最後由於大自然災難衝擊，導致農場經營失敗，迫使她離去這個她賴以印證、再造自我的異地天堂。失意之餘，她在 1942 年重返丹麥，將這 17 年的經歷在回憶錄中娓娓道來。 本論文以雅克 • 德希達 (Jacques Derrida)「悅納異己」(hospitality) 的理論探討丹尼森的「虛構自我」(fictional I)──凱倫 • 布莉克森 (Karen Blixen) 在異地與他者相處的細節。她以客人的姿態進入肯亞，卻以農場主人的身份停留 17 年。由於身份的尷尬與模糊，使她自始至終都必須在罪惡感與焦慮中掙扎。這樣的模糊身份也直接影響了她身為農場主人所展現的待客之道。她一方面希望給予當地人「無條件待客之道」(unconditional hospitality)，但另一方面又礙於殖民情境下的種種因素，迫使她不得不實行「有條件待客之道」(conditional hospitality)。布莉克森的模糊身份、處在異地的心境，以及與他者相處的細節都和這兩種待客之道的更迭交替息息相關。 布莉克森的農場是個「交會區」(contact zone)，充滿不同文化的衝突與交融，也隱約存在著殖民情境下的階級氛圍。在此交會區中，布莉克森與農場上的當地人皆努力將其轉化為「安全地帶」(safe house)，以農場的合諧為最終目標，企圖弭平因文化差異而造成的緊張與衝突。在對於流亡白人的接待上，布莉克森又試圖將其轉化為德希達式的「新城市」(New City)，開放接受流亡到肯亞的白人。雖然最後「安全地帶」與「新城市」的理想都因農場經營的失敗告終，布莉克森的努力仍具有其價值；而理解殖民情境下種種理想的不可能性，也成為她旅行後的成長。 / Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, written in the beginning of the 20th century, is one of the modernist travel narratives which manifest the white settlers’ experiences in a foreign land. Dinesen spent 17 years of her prime time in Kenya, searching for a life answer only to find its ungraspability in the end. She returned to Denmark in 1942—a defeated homecoming—and rearranged her exotic experiences in the structure of a tragedy, a five-act play, and “telling a play” in front of her readers (Trousdale 171). With Jacques Derrida’s theory of hospitality, this thesis aims to trace how Blixen’s days in Kenya is characterized by her struggles over her own ambiguous identities as both the guest of the country and the host of the farm. As her stay in Kenya and her running of the farm are under the control of the colonial law, she hopes to compensate it with the unconditional hospitality to the Natives. However, under the colonial context, the hospitality she practices is constantly rendered conditional due to the possible problems dwelling in this “contact zone” (Pratt 6). Instead of focusing only on her possible imperial attempts in Kenya, this thesis hopes to explore more aspects of her role by tracing her interactions with the Natives. Although her farm is rifled with diverse cultural conflicts, Blixen strives to turn the contact zone into a “safe house,” a social space where all the members try to ignore the hierarchical system rooted prior to their encounters. She also tries to change it into a Derridian New City to welcome the white wanderers, and practice the two imperatives of hospitality in harmony. This ideal New City is an embodied projection of Blixen’s life pursuit as a colonial Odysseus, yet her struggles prove to be futile in the end. Dinesen’s act of writing—rearranging the memories in an elegiac tone—records her illusion in the beginning and her disillusionment in the end of the travel. Narcissistic as her ideal may seem, her efforts of bridging the cultural gaps and integrating with the native land cannot be ignored.

This work attempts an answer to two questions. Firstly, is it possible to experience meaning when everything is transient? And secondly, in what way is objectivity possible when it comes to such phenomena as existential meaning? The questions originate from our insideperspective, and it is from what we have experienced ourselves that we try to make intelligible existential meaning. We are to a great extent part of the context in which we live. Our ability to contemplate our situation and our own contemplation is taking place in interplay with others. To make room for the small things meaningful in life, the expression existential meaning is used. In this expression both the meaningless and the meaningful are included, since both are needed for our understanding of meaning. Without the Other and that which is different, the individual person’s formation of existential meaning becomes just more of the same, it becomes an enclosure in the present. The encounter with the Other makes room for that which is different to break through. Objectivity is possible when it comes to existential meaning, if one views objectivity as a process between people. It is performed in conversation. Those who converse, refer to their bodily experiences of the Time that remains and help each other, using language as the tool, to formulate their experiences. They compare each others’ manifestations of existential meaning, and with the help of language they go further in the formation of what is meaningless and meaningful. Their conversations imply a normative presupposition that they can justify the claims that they make. Because it is actually not possible to make intelligible existential meaning in words other than by doing it as a mix of descriptions of that which is manifesting itself and linguistic rewritings in the form of stories. This expression of objectivity has a normative aspect, namely in relation to the possibility that we can be wrong. Therefore, we need each other in the act of judging, and together we are guided by the fact that it later on can emerge things that show that our judgment has not been fully correct.

From September 19th through October 3rd, 2008, Congress debated the largest government bailout in America history—the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA). Those sixteen days generated a vibrant conversation regarding the nature and severity of America’s economic crisis and the proper role of government in responding to such juggernauts. In this dissertation I explore the rhetoric generated by this bill and its context in hopes of illuminating the more general role of rhetoric in mitigating and exacerbating crises in capitalism. My hypothesis is that, in a global capitalist economy increasingly dependent on immaterial production (i.e., finance, the Internet, mass media, etc.), economic crisis rhetoric has become as essential to economic order as monetary and fiscal policy. To explore this claim, I focus on two key rhetorical tensions that drove much of the crisis rhetoric produced. The first of these battles is a rhetorical struggle over the spatial delineation between Wall Street and Main Street, while the second is a conflict between Keynesianism and neoliberalism in a rhetorical contest over the values of government interventionism. By analyzing a variety of policy and expert discourses that constitute the parameters of these discrete areas of debate, I argue that all rely on moral and ethical appeals to substantiate their meaning and validity. At the same time, I contend that these discourses are indebted to logics of institutional form and therefore cannot be abstracted from the financial and political contexts in which they reside. This insight leads me to forward a new theory of economic crisis rhetoric called the economic imaginary. By beginning with real economic events and then taking into account the discursive and extra-discursive forces that “overdetermine” its mediated understanding, the economic imaginary offers us a more empirical and cartographic account of how economic rhetoric actually operates in society. / text

Cette dissertation explore la carrière de la rencontre manquée Lacanienne dans la littérature canonique américaine du dix-neuvième siècle à travers le prisme de la psychanalyse, la déconstruction, le postmodernisme et le postcolonialisme. Je me concentre particulièrement sur La Lettre Écarlate de Hawthorne et Moby-Dick de Melville, en montrant comment ils sont investis dans l'économie narrative de la rencontre manquée, l'économie de ce qui est au-delà de la symbolisation et l'assimilation. L’introduction examine les contours et les détours historiques, philosophiques et théoriques du concept de la rencontre manquée. Cette dissertation a donc deux objectifs: d'une part, elle tente d'examiner le statut et la fonction de la rencontre manquée dans la littérature américaine du dix-neuvième siècle, et d’autre part, elle explore comment la théorisation de la rencontre manquée pourrait nous aider à aller au-delà de la théorisation binaire qui caractérise les scènes géopolitiques actuelles. Mon premier chapitre sur La Lettre Écarlate de Hawthorne, tente de tracer la carrière du signifiant comme une navette entre l'archive et l'avenir, entre le sujet et l'objet, entre le signifiant et le signifié. Le but de ce chapitre est de rendre compte de la temporalité du signifiant et la temporalité de la subjectivité et d’expliquer comment ils répondent à la temporalité du tuché. En explorant la dimension crypto-temporelle de la rencontre manquée, ce chapitre étudie l'excès de cryptes par la poétique (principalement prosopopée, anasémie, et les tropes d'exhumation). Le deuxième chapitre élabore sur les contours de la rencontre manquée. En adoptant des approches psychanalytiques et déconstructives, ce chapitre négocie la temporalité de la rencontre manquée (la temporalité de l'automaton et de la répétition). En explorant la temporalité narrative (prolepse et analepse) conjointement à la psycho-poétique du double, ce chapitre essaie de dévoiler les vicissitudes de la mélancolie et la “dépression narcissique” dans Moby-Dick (en particulier la répétition d'Achab lors de sa rencontre originelle dénarrée ou jamais racontée avec le cachalot blanc et sa position mélancolique par rapport à l'objet qu'il a perdu). En exposant la nature du trauma comme une rencontre manquée, dont les résidus se manifestent symptomatiquement par la répétition (et le doublement), ce chapitre explique le glissement de la lettre (par l'entremise du supplément et de la différance). Le troisième chapitre élargit la portée de la rencontre manquée pour inclure les Autres de l'Amérique. Le but principal de ce chapitre est d'évaluer les investitures politiques, culturelles, imaginaires et libidinales de la rencontre manquée dans le Réel, le Symbolique nationale des États-Unis et la réalité géopolitique actuelle. Il traite également de la relation ambiguë entre la jouissance et le Symbolique: la manière dont la jouissance anime et régit le Symbolique tout en confondant la distinction entre le Réel et la réalité et en protégeant ses manœuvres excessives. / This dissertation explores the career of the Lacanian missed encounter in canonical nineteenth-century American literature through the lens of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. In particular, I concentrate on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s Moby-Dick, showing how they are invested in the narrative economy of the missed encounter, the economy of that which is beyond symbolization and assimilation. The introductory chapter investigates the historical, philosophical, and theoretical contours and detours of the concept of the missed encounter. This dissertation, then, has two goals: on the one hand, it attempts to examine the status and function of the missed encounter in nineteenth-century American literature, and on the other, it explores how theorizing the missed encounter might help us move beyond the binarist theorization that characterizes the current geopolitical scenes. My first chapter on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter attempts to map the career of the signifier as a shuttling between the archive and the future, between the subject and the object, and between the signifier and the signified. The aim of this chapter is to account for the temporality of the signifier and the temporality of subjectivity and how they meet the temporality of the Tuché. By exploring the crypto-temporal dimension of the missed encounter, this chapter studies the excess of crypts through poetics (mainly prosopopeia, anasemia, and tropes of exhumation). The second chapter elaborates the contours of the missed encounter. This chapter approaches, from psychoanalytic and deconstructive viewpoints, the temporality of the missed encounter (the temporality of automaton and repetition). By exploring the narrative temporality (prolepsis and analepsis) in conjunction with the psycho-poetics of the double, this chapter attempts to lay bare the vicissitudes of melancholia and “narcissistic depression” in Moby-Dick (especially Ahab’s repetition of his unnarrated or disnarrated original encounter with the White Whale and his melancholic position in relation to the object he lost). By exposing the nature of trauma as a missed encounter, the residues of which manifest symptomatically through repetition (and doubling), this chapter explains the glissement of the letter (through the work of the supplement and différance). Chapter three broadens the scope of the missed encounter to the Others of America. The main purpose of this chapter is to assess the political, cultural, imaginary, and libidinal investitures of the missed encounter in the Real, the national Symbolic of the United States, and the current geopolitical reality. It also deals with the ambiguous relationship between jouissance and the Symbolic: the way in which jouissance animates and governs the Symbolic, while at the same time it blurs the boundary lines between the Real and reality and protects its excessive maneuvers.

Le texte qui suit, malgré son libellé onomastique (le nom « John Cage »), son orientation disciplinaire (la « théorie littéraire ») et sa visée thématique (« la révision du commentaire critique »), se place d’emblée dans une posture d’écriture et de création. Il consiste à proposer comme point de départ l’identité de la forme textuelle et de sa dérivation métatextuelle, en d’autres mots : de la voix citée et analysée avec l’autre voix citante et analysante. Cette prémisse dérive elle-même d’une confrontation locale : les spécificités et les idiosyncrasies de la textualité mise en place par John Cage à partir des années quarante (partitions littéraires des recueils Silence et A Year from Monday, mésostiches de M et X, réécritures et « writing through » d’Empty Words…). En effet, l’examen par la théorie littéraire d’un corpus aussi disséminé et « néologique » que l’est celui de John Cage pousse son rédacteur à poser la question de sa propre écriture (« autoréflexivité ») et à rendre possible une réalisation artistique personnelle (« performativité »). C’est donc à travers la contingence d’une langue et d’une subjectivité au travail que la théorisation (textuelle) du texte cherche ici à s’élucider et à s’écrire. Le travail commence par installer les modalités à la fois circulaires et circulatoires de la théorie littéraire, une tension rhétorique et épistémologique qu’il identifie sous le nom d’« aporie autoréflexive » (le texte théorique est concerné par la question de lui-même). Il s’efforce ensuite d’analyser la nouveauté de l’œuvre littéraire cagienne, en empruntant un schéma dialectique et antagoniste : d’un côté, une « textualité-objet », originale et orthographique, de l’autre, une « textualité-sujet », disséminante et intertextuelle, anarchique et jubilatoire. Enfin, le texte propose la révision, la recomposition, la « réécriture » du commentaire critique sur les bases nouvelles d’une textologie autoréflexive et performative — une indiscipline d’écriture qui utilise sciemment les coordonnées linguistiques de son élocution (néologie, typographisme, procédés citationnels…) et qui fait place sans camouflage ou refoulement à la personnalité intertextuelle, contextuelle, métissée du rédacteur. Par l’entremise d’une sorte d’« exemplarité textuelle » (Cage), ce travail insiste pour une synthèse à la fois productive et expressive des voix analysées et analysantes dans les études littéraires. On verra que, par moments, cette proposition implique que le texte se marginalise. / The following text, despite its onomastic labelling (the name “John Cage”), its disciplinary orientation (“literary theory”), and its thematic aim (“the revision of the literary commentary”), positions itself as a writing and creative venture. It starts by stating the strict identity of texts and metatexts, in other words, of the quoted, analyzed voice, with the quoting, analyzing other voice. This premise derives from a specific confrontation: the specificities and idiosyncrasies of John Cage’s literary production since the late 1940s (the literary scores from the anthologies Silence and A Year from Monday, the mesostics from M and X, the rewritings and “Writing through’s” from Empty Words…). Indeed, the examination by literary theory of a body of work as disseminated and “neological” as John Cage’s encourages the literary critic or theoretician to ask the question of his own writing (“self-reflexivity”) and also to make possible an original artistic realization (“performativity”). It is therefore through the possibilities of a language and of a subjectivity at work that the (textual) theorization of texts tries herein to elucidate and to write itself. This work starts by setting up the modalities both circular and circulatory of literary theory—a rhetorical and epistemological tension that will be identified as the “self-reflexive aporia” (the theoretical text is primarily concerned by the question of itself). It then tries to analyze the novelty of Cage’s literary work, using a dialectical and antagonistic configuration: on one hand, an “objective textuality”, original and orthographical; on the other hand, a “subjective textuality”, disseminating and intertextual, anarchic and unrestrained. Finally, this text proposes the revision, recomposition and “rewriting” of the critical commentary on the basis of a new self-reflexive and performative textology. That is: a sort of undiscipline in writing that knowingly manoeuvres the linguistic coordinates of its elocution (neology, typographism, quotation processes…) and that does not try to conceal or repress the intertextual, contextual, heterogenous and disparate personality of its author. Through a sort of “textual exemplarity” (Cage), this work insists on a synthesis both productive and expressive between the voices analyzing and the voices being analyzed. We will see accordingly that this proposition implies, from time to time, that the text be marginalized. / Toutes les illustrations qui ponctuent cette thèse ont été réalisées par Chantal Poirier. Elles ont été insérées dans le texte selon un ordre méticuleusement aléatoire.

保羅•奧斯特的〈紐約三部曲〉被歸類為「反偵探小說」（anti-detective novel）。在這三個故事裡，因緣際會背負了偵探角色的主角們，試圖還原事件的真相，卻個個受挫，甚至迷失在糾纏的線索與沈重的身份認同的遊戲中。他們像是一腳踏進了令人暈眩的泥沼，非但沒法用理智脫困，還愈陷愈深，隨著迷宮裡的音樂瘋狂起舞。 鈴鈴鈴不時搖著鈴鼓迷惑他們的聲響來自一串一串的文字：當他們想藉語言探求「真實」時，才發現無論語言或是理智都從來不是靜止與透明的。此外，與偵探行為息息相關的「命名」（naming）問題，也是〈紐約三部曲〉中的一個焦點。主角們的名字彷彿細軟的藤蔓般糾結在一塊，命名的議題以有趣的方式被呈現在這部小說中。本篇論文還要探討這部小說如何處理讀者與作者的辯證關係，因為讀者一走進這本小說便參與了作者精心設計的巨大遊戲。 本篇論文將研討〈紐約三部曲〉反映的三個問題：再現的問題、命名的侷限性，以及讀者與作者耐人尋味的關係。再現的問題會放到德希達(Jacques Derrida)提出的「延異」（differance）觀念下解釋—事物的意義不可能立即被揭露，而是永遠處在一種「延異」的狀況下。小說中主角們對唯一真實的追尋因而不可能被應許，而是遭遇一而再、再而三的延遲。另一方面，〈紐約三部曲〉對命名的功能性有所保留。本論文將疊合本小說中對命名的質疑與波赫士短篇小說裡對命名的不信任，說明奧斯特對命名的解構。〈紐約三部曲〉對命名抱持矛盾的態度：命名既幫助人們架構他們的世界，卻又滑溜溜的歪曲了人們的自我認識，讓他們被自身的自主性的假象蒙蔽。此外，讀者和作者究竟是不是維繫著一種同盟關係呢？本論文試圖闡釋存在〈紐約三部曲〉中，他們之間相互依存、卻又競逐對文意的解釋權的關係。只不過，躲在文字的簾幕後偷看著的黑影，始終是作者的吧？！ 〈紐約三部曲〉訴說的是一個追尋的故事。這個歷程沒有終結、沒有絕對的答案，只有故事拖長了腳步的身影。這個反偵探故事否定了許多關於理智的邏輯，但是它為書寫開闢了另一種可能：書寫與閱讀可以是無限延長的生命肌理。文字從不直接給予人們他們孜孜尋找的解答，他們只告訴你你將在文字中漂流的命運。 / Labelled as an anti-detective novel, The New York Trilogy defies the traditional detective process and instead renders the experience for man to distill and to locate meaning as an agonizing one. The protagonists in The Trilogy undertake the roles of the detective, hoping to reveal a sole truth behind the entangled situation. Yet they are not only frustrated in disclosing meaning, but thrown into extreme bafflement. Their identities fall apart, wriggling in the maze built by spiral words, crossed names and the ongoing efforts to define the relations. The protagonists find everything they used to hold as truth shudder. Language no longer stands for a limpid means to represent the real but rather shakes their beliefs. When they try to name and to draw their realm of autonomy over the flowing phenomena, they find naming a problematic strategy to define the world. Furthermore, as detective-readers who attempt to decode the text, the protagonists are desperate to comprehend their relations with the “writer” of their books, as the reader does in reading The Trilogy. This thesis attempts to probe into three prominent issues raised in The New York Trilogy: dubious representation, problematic naming strategy, and the peculiar bond between the reader and the writer. The doubtful representation in the novel will be examined under what Derrida suggests in “Differance”: Meaning can never be fully present, but remains in a state of differance. The protagonists in the three stories cannot disclose an overriding truth, but float in such a wave of doubts, uncertainties, and changing phenomena of the world. Also, the problematic strategy of naming will be compared with Borges’suspicion towards naming. Under both cases, naming serves as an extreme yet slippery means for man to draw his territory. In addition, the relation between the reader and the writer in the novel is investigated. The detecting process in the novel embodies the pursuit of the reader out of the text. Thus reading and writing are delineated as an everlasting journey. When the detective and the criminal as well as the reader and the writer seem to be in contest for the power of explanation, the pairing relation actually forms a close tie: The detective cannot live without the criminal; the reader and the writer need the eyesight of each other to survive. The New York Trilogy is not a journey providing answers but a whirl to disrupt the truth. Declining any definite inspiration, it nevertheless obliquely affirms the value of reading and writing. After exhausting complexities of the cases, only the reader remains. And what is heard even after one closes the pages is the voice of the reader encircling within the space. And the voice keeps telling and telling until the story belongs to him. We as readers will keep narrating the story with our little voice.

This thesis explores the sense and the implications of the messianicity without messianism, a quasi-concept coined by the thinker Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) in the 1990s that refers to a “structure of experience” characterized by a lack of conclusion. On the one hand, this thesis examines the role that this notion plays within the vast work of Derrida; it aims at demonstrating that it neither indicates a rupture nor it constitutes a mere reformulation of his previous postulates. On the other hand, it establishes a dialogue between this quasi-concept and the use that a number of authors of the XXth century and the beginning of the XXIst, from different contexts and interests, do of the messianic tradition in order to formulate their own understandings of history, linguistics, politics and ethics. This thesis goes in depth into the shortcomings of the proposals of these authors and claims that the messianicity without messianism avoids many of them and offers a more fertile model for describing reality and acting in it. The final aim is to contribute to the reception of this quasi-concept ―which, in our opinion, so far has been slanted and insufficient― and prove that it rescues us from both the risks of the fundamentalisms and those of the paralyzing “everything goes” brought about by the phenomenon of the death of God. / Esta tesis explora el sentido y las implicaciones de la mesianicidad sin mesianismo, un casi-concepto acuñado por el pensador Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) en los años noventa del siglo XX que alude a una “estructura general de la experiencia” caracterizada por la ausencia de conclusión. Por un lado, esta tesis examina el papel que dicha noción desempeña dentro de la vasta obra de Derrida; quiere demostrar que ni supone una ruptura en su obra ni se trata de una mera reformulación de postulados anteriores. Por el otro, establece un diálogo entre este casi-concepto y el uso que una serie de autores del siglo XX e inicios del XXI, desde contextos e intereses distintos, hacen de la tradición mesiánica para formular sus propias concepciones de la historia, la lingüística, la política y la ética. Esta tesis ahonda en las limitaciones de las propuestas de estos autores y defiende que la mesianicidad sin mesianismo evita muchas de ellas y ofrece un modelo más fértil para describir la realidad e intervenir en ella. Todo ello con la voluntad de contribuir a la recepción de este casi-concepto ―que consideramos que, hasta el momento, ha sido sesgada e insuficiente― y mostrar que nos rescata de los riesgos tanto de los fundamentalismos como del paralizante “todo vale” acarreado por el fenómeno de la muerte de Dios.

This thesis aims to reveal paradigms associated with the operation of Western architectural oligarchies. The research is an examination into "how" dominant architectural institutions and their figureheads are undermined through the subversive collaboration of younger, unrecognised architects. By appropriating theories found in Jacques Derrida's writings in philosophy, the thesis interprets the evolution of post World War II polemical architectural thinking as a series of political friendships. In order to provide evidence, the thesis involves the rewriting of a portion of modern architectural history, 1949-1987. Modern architectural history is rewritten as a series of three friendship partnerships which have been selected because of their subversive reaction to their respective establishments. They are English architects, Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson; South African born architect and planner, Denise Scott Brown and North American architect, Robert Venturi; and Greek architect, Elia Zenghelis and Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas. Crucial to the undermining of their respective enemies is the friends' collaboration on subversive projects. These projects are built, unbuilt and literary. Warring publicly through the writing of seminal texts is a significant step towards undermining the dominance of their ideological opponents. It also appears that through the making of these projects, the unrecognised architects are able to convert themselves to being recognised as new figureheads. This thesis contends that as a consequence of the power within each of the three friendship partnerships, the architects are enabled to collaborate against the dominant ideology of their respective enemies and gain status. It also contends that a cycle of friendship and warring is the political system by which the institution of modern architecture has historically reengineered itself to suit the times.

This submission comes in two parts; the written dissertation, Contemporary art: the key issues, and the exhibition Melbourne - Moderne. When taken together they present a discourse on the conditions facing contemporary art practice and one artist’s response to these conditions in the context of Melbourne 2003-2007. (For complete abstract open document)

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