The Cudgel and the Caress

David Farrell Krell

Description

The Cudgel and the Caress explores the enduring significance of tenderness and cruelty in a range of works across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. Divided into two parts, the book initially focuses on tenderness, with David Farrell Krell delivering original readings of Homer's Iliad, Sophocles's Antigone, and writings by Hölderlin, Hegel, Freud, and Derrida that deal with the importance of tenderness and the tragic consequences of its absence. Part One concludes with an extended reading of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, in which Krell analyzes the tender relationship between Ulrich and Agathe. In Part Two, Krell begins by examining Otto Rank's Birth Trauma, which reflects on the tenderness of gestation in the womb and the cruel necessity of birth. He then turns to an examination of cruelty in general, focusing on Derrida's challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis, his opposition between Kant and Nietzsche, and his analysis (and indictment) of the death penalty. Groundbreaking and insightful, the book provides a rare philosophical treatment of subjects vital to the world we live in.
Preface
Key to the Principal Sources Cited
Introduction

Part I. Tenderness (Zärtlichkeit)

1. Tenderness and Tragedy

2. Homer’s Iliad, Holderlin’s Briseiad

3. Tender Antigone—Forever Younger

4. Tender Schlegel, Irascible Hegel

5. Pulling Strings Wins No Wisdom

6. A Woman Without Qualities?

Part II. Cruelty (Grausamkeit)

7. Caress of Gestation, Cudgel of Birth

8. The Nervous System of a Specter

9. Freedom, Imputability, Cruelty

10. Cruelty, Power, Art, Tenderness

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Philosophie du langage
• Philosophie de la langue
• Philosophy
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 14 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438472997
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Cudgel and the Caress
SUNY SERIES IN C ONTEMPORARY C ONTINENTAL P HILOSOPHY
Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
The Cudgel and the Caress
Reflections on Cruelty and Tenderness
David Farrell Krell
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Krell, David Farrell, author.
Title: The cudgel and the caress : reflections on cruelty and tenderness / David Farrell Krell.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018014242| ISBN 9781438472973 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438472997 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Cruelty—Philosophy. | Tenderness (Psychology)—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC BJ1535.C7 K74 2019 | DDC 179—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014242
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book—but only in its tender aspect—is for my brother
Jonathan F. Krell
Contents
Preface
Key to the Principal Sources Cited
Introduction
Part One Tenderness ( Zärtlichkeit )
1. Tenderness and Tragedy
2. Homer’s Iliad , Hölderlin’s Briseiad
3. Tender Antigone—Forever Younger
4. Tender Schlegel, Irascible Hegel
5. Pulling Strings Wins No Wisdom
6. A Woman Without Qualities?
Part Two Cruelty ( Grausamkeit )
7. Caress of Gestation, Cudgel of Birth
8. The Nervous System of a Specter
9. Freedom, Imputability, Cruelty
10. Cruelty, Power, Art, Tenderness
Index
Preface
The Cudgel and the Caress consists of two parts, the first on the theme of tenderness (the German word Zärtlichkeit ), the second on the theme of cruelty ( Grausamkeit ). After its ten chapters were finished, at least in first draft form, the problem became how they should be ordered. Should the discussion of cruelty come first, so that tenderness could then serve as a balm? Friends who looked at these chapters suggested that my ordering of them here be reversed, and it was a good suggestion—after all, in the title the cudgel of cruelty comes first. Yet I decided to retain the chronology of the chapters as they appear here, which is the order in which they were conceived and written. For the very first chapter, on tragedy, has to do with the disappearance of tenderness as the key to the cruelties depicted in tragedy. That chapter also begins with a kind of confession—involving the ease with which one can fail to write about tenderness, which is no doubt related to vulnerability and hence prone to avoidance, escape, and even reactive cruelty. To compensate for the cudgel that follows upon the caress, the final chapter of the book tries to find its way back to tenderness by way of an account of artistic creativity.
The style of almost all the chapters is less formal than rigorous readers may expect and demand. That comes from the fact that many of them were first formulated as lectures, not as scholarly articles. I have reworked all of them and tried to clarify my arguments and note all my sources, but I was loath to emend the informality, which I hope does not offend. There is something about the themes of tenderness and cruelty that resists formal scholarly presentation. And the royal or papal we has never appealed to me.
Chapter 1 was initially an address to faculty and students at the University of Manitoba in March 2005, while I was a visiting lecturer there. The piece appeared in a different form under the title “Tenderness: Aristotle, Hölderlin, Freud, Lacan, Irigaray,” in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature . I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Professor Dawne McCance, at that time the editor of Mosaic . The interview, part of her “Crossings” series of interviews, and the address, together with a generous introduction by Dawne McCance, appear in vol. 39, no. 1 of the journal (March 2006): v–vi, 1–43. This was the first of many visits to Manitoba. I owe more than I can express to Professor McCance, who also read parts of the present book and offered helpful suggestions, and also to her colleagues and her students for their encouragement and their thought-provoking challenges over the years.
Chapter 2 , in its earliest form, was a lecture, “Zum Begriff der Zärtlichkeit bei Hölderlin und Freud,” delivered at the Universität Freiburg-im-Breisgau on November 3, 2008. I never published it, perhaps because I am not a Graecist and cannot write on Homer with authority; yet even if my Homer is closer to Hölderlin’s Homer than any classical philologist would tolerate, I still believe in the tenderness of those cudgel-wielding Greeks.
Chapter 3 grew out of my encounter with Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of Sophocles’s Antigone in Lacan’s seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis . Chapter 11 of my Tragic Absolute took up that interpretation, emphasizing what Lacan calls the éclat of Antigone. David Jones, the editor of The Journal of Comparative and Continental Philosophy , asked me to elaborate on that chapter, and the result was “Forever Younger: A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone ,” published in the inaugural issue of the journal in 2009, 55–75. I have altered and expanded the article here. My thanks to David Jones for his invitation and for his generous support over the years.
Chapter 4 has a long history. I first read Hegel on Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde in the early 1980s. Hegel was so upset by the novel that I simply had to read it. To my surprise, it was the “spiritual” quality of Schlegel’s novel that impressed me, because it involved a very different kind of “spirit” than Hegel’s. I first published an article on Hegel and Schlegel on the invitation of Drucilla Cornell. It appeared under the ironic title “Lucinde’s Shame: Hegel, Sensuous Woman, and the Law,” in Hegel and Legal Theory , ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 287–300. It was then revised and reprinted under the same title in Feminist Readings of Hegel , ed. Patricia Jagentowicz Mills (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 89–107. My thanks to Drucilla Cornell and Patricia Jagentowicz Mills for their kind reception of the piece. It has changed quite a bit here in its new version, however.
Chapter 5 was first presented at the Mosaic conference “Freud—after Derrida,” at the University of Manitoba in October 2010. “Pulling Strings Wins No Wisdom” was a plenary address at the conference and was then published in Mosaic 44:3 (September 2011): 15–28. My thanks, again, to Dawne McCance for the invitation and for the kind reception of the piece, which I confess has great personal significance for me, perhaps because of the Greek word for wisdom, Σοφία.
Chapter 6 appears here for the first time. It was the final piece to be completed for the volume. Yet my reading of Robert Musil goes back to the mid-1970s when a student of mine at the University of Freiburg—Michael Walter, now one of Germany’s most renowned translators of English-language literary texts—pressed into my hands Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften with the words “ Dies ist unser Joyce .” I have been reading Musil ever since. His extraordinary novel, never completed, comes up twice in my own book: first here in chapter 6 , where I argue that the story of Ulrich and Agathe is one of the most remarkable accounts of tenderness in all of literature, then in chapter 9 , where a very different story—that of the psychopathic serial killer, Moosbrugger—is recounted. If I am no Graecist, then neither am I a Germanist, so that these excursions of mine into Musil’s world manifest nothing like masterful scholarship. But they do reveal my fascination with what I take to be the best of twentieth-century fiction in the German language.
Chapter 7 , on Otto Rank’s Das Trauma der Geburt (1924), also appears here for the first time. It grew out of my study of Sándor Ferenczi’s Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality , published that same year. Ferenczi and Rank were close associates during that time, working on what they called “active therapy,” and both were interested in the biological and physiological bases of psychic life. For Rank, the cruelty of the birth trauma truncates the tenderness of intrauterine existence.
Chapter 8 first took the form of a double review article on Derrida’s remarkable seminar on the death penalty. Under the title “From Cruelty to Grausamkeit : Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminar,” it appeared in Research in Phenomenology in vol. 47 (2017): 263–96. I have revised and expanded it for the present book.
Chapter 9 originally appeared in somewhat different form in Frei sein, frei handeln , ed. D. D’Angelo, S. Gourdaine, T. Keiling, and N. Mirkovic (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2013), 126–43. My gratitude to all my students at the University of Freiburg over the years.
Chapter 10 was the subject of a workshop presented at Brown University in March 2016. It has not been published before. My thanks to Professor Gerhard Richter and to all my colleagues at Brown, where, even if no Germanist, I am proud to be Brauer Visiting Professor of German Studies.
My thanks to Alexander Bilda, Julia Ireland, Andrew Kenyon, Dawne McCance, Denny Schmidt, and Michael Walter, along with the entire editorial and production staff at SUNY Press.
D. F. K.
Strobelhütte, St. Ulrich
Key to the Principal Sources Cited
Works by Jacques Derrida BS 1, 2 Séminaire: La bête