Books by James Dutton
Proust Between Deleuze and Derrida: The Remains of Literature
Edinburgh University Press, 2022
James Dutton argues that Proust’s lone published text, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), s... more James Dutton argues that Proust’s lone published text, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), stages a uniquely productive encounter between philosophy and literature. In its genre-defying originality, it anticipates some of the most important concepts and strategies of poststructuralist French thought exemplified in the work of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.
While Derrida and Deleuze are often held to occupy irreconcilable philosophical positions, both philosophers are equally relevant to an understanding of Proust’s philosophical significance, which fundamentally rests on his deferral of textual presence. Drawing on a range of conceptual tools from these two philosophers, including many that are often overlooked by commentators, Dutton shows that À la recherche stages a process of uninterrupted textual becoming, in which the distinction between the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘literature’ themselves is broken down. He reads textuality as constitutively unfinished, suggesting a new confluence between all three thinkers’ emphasis on life as an endlessly productive deferral.
Journal Articles by James Dutton
Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2024
This article critiques Google’s conversion of knowledge into information from the perspective of ... more This article critiques Google’s conversion of knowledge into information from the perspective of linguistic performance. It claims that the political effects of signifi- cation are resistant to discrete or fixed translations, where instead the incalculable dimensions of knowledge emerge between languages—that is, in-translation. To do so, the article reads Barbara Cassin’s extensive work on sophistics, untranslatability theory, and Google itself to argue that the unfinishability of performance, translation, and the dimensions of meaning are the openings to political life. Cassin’s insight, that “we never stop (not) translating,” emphasizes the value of performance, one foreclosed by Google’s squaring of doxa. The article analyzes the historical transmission and scholarly impact of knowledge to argue that understanding comes from an uncertain staging of knowledge between languages—languages, that is, always among others.
Paragraph, 2024
Where is globalization? In this article, I will read two very different theories of space to reth... more Where is globalization? In this article, I will read two very different theories of space to rethink the rhetorical commonplaces that make globalization possible. In so doing, I analyse how these commonplaces produce an immanent globe that has exclusionary implications for how human life is described. One of the most original critiques of globalization culture belongs to Peter Sloterdijk, whose 2005 book describes it as holding its subjects In the World Interior [Weltinnenraum] of Capital. This is Sloterdijk's name for our late stage of globalization where 'the dignity of distances is negated', resulting in a uniform space where 'the earth -along with its local ecstasies -shrinks to almost nothing, until nothing remains of its royal extension but a worn-out logo'. 1 This 'world-inside-space' is forged by globalizing technologies -not only telecommunications, digital media and industrial tourism, but the wearing out of techno-logos itself. That is, I want to examine how what Barbara Cassin calls 'rhetorics of space' have laid out and cut up discourse -our techniques for saying world. This essay will read Sloterdijk's spherology with Cassin's sophistical 'logology' -on the surface two almost incompatible theories, one directed to space, the other time -around their interest in how space, and world, are discursively produced. It will take up both thinkers' approaches to discourse and, more pertinently, the shared thread running through Cassin's and Sloterdijk's work around the materialization of discourse as what -or rather when -we call 'space'. Cassin's reading of the Sophists' rhetorics of time challenges global understandings of space as a 'topos-machine', one that standardizes sensory equivocity. Cassin shows instead how
Cultural Critique, 2024
This article discusses sport and stupidity to understand modernity's valorization of explication.... more This article discusses sport and stupidity to understand modernity's valorization of explication. It reads Robert Musil's modernist novel The Man Without Qualities, which takes numerous excursive opportunities to discuss the role of sport in modern culture and its relationship to "genius," claiming that the grammar of industrial sports has reduced our ability to pay attention to the possibilities within acts we increasingly judge as simply "stupid." To do so, it follows Peter Sloterdijk's critique of modernity's mania for explication at all costs—to the detriment of the vital underside of thinking, or what he calls the implicit. This is explored in numerous examples from Musil's "essayistic" novel, a text that its author showed no willingness to complete—thus leaving its implicit possibilities open, and interminably "without qualities."
Film-Philosophy, 2023
This article interprets David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) to argue for the morphological infl... more This article interprets David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) to argue for the morphological influence cinematic images have on modernity's monstrous identity. It shows how Lynch's tactic of interweaving apparently discrete spaces of dream and realityone often inverting or uncannily ironising the otherrelies on the virtual space of cinema, which leaves a mark on understanding, irrespective of its apparent truth. To do so, I employ Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy of spaceespecially the spherology developed in his Spheres trilogyand Bernard Stiegler's approach to cinematic phenomenology to consider the transferential force of cinema, and its power to cultivate and shape popular consciousness. Mulholland Drive is acutely aware of this force, and its interplay with the expectations and disappointments of Hollywood monstrosity inserts itself into the sphere-forming traffic of modern meaning-making. In doing so, I argue, the film takes up Lynch's familiar approach to irony and the weird to unwind the destructive uniformity of Hollywood hegemony. The productive bifurcations that result, inscribed in between cinema and consciousness, and forgettable as the very spheric intimacy of memory, gesture to what might live beyond discrete forms.
Criticism, 2022
This essay examines the modern temporization of labor to ask: what happens to the human subject t... more This essay examines the modern temporization of labor to ask: what happens to the human subject that, in signing the labor contract, resigns their “self” to time? It begins by considering comments made by the “actors” in Jean-Luc Godard’s Six fois deux / Sur et sous la communication (1976) as an interstice between labor, subjectivity, and capital, to argue for a confluence between all forms of inscription. It then shows how iterability, the infinite interpretability of inscription, offers a possibility of irrepressible difference, one that can never be timed out of laboring subjectivities or the writing that gives them.
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2022
This essay will examine what it takes to be two foundational aspects of traditional metaphysics—t... more This essay will examine what it takes to be two foundational aspects of traditional metaphysics—the “concepts” of nothingness and nature—to offer a critical reading of how they enframe our understanding of “life.” It asserts that these two concepts are the limit point for metaphysical thought: the tangle that emerges when trying to overcome or reimagine them is an impasse encountered in pressing humanist concerns like ecological collapse, nihilism, alienation, and extinction. Readers of this journal may value a detailed, technical attempt at such an untangling; this article will suggest that a heightened sense of technics can be productive of a new image of thought, one that might escape the anthropocentric basis of these concerns.1 In doing so, the argument will insist on the flaw within certain metaphysical schematisms’ desire to appropriate, to form and hold sense into static and reproducible properties—a desire notably critiqued in Bernard Stiegler’s reading of technics. This flaw, it suggests, is constitutive of a sense of nature and nothingness based on property, one Stiegler notes is how we enframe being(s). It will then discuss Gilles Deleuze’s notable critiques of such “proper” enframing’s impossible limits and, following Deleuze, will turn to Marcel Proust’s writing as suggestive of a new image of thought—one that, focused on imagining (or enframing) nothingness through writing, inscribes an indelible remainder as that very imagination, suggesting that it is nothingness “it”self that will always remain.
Cultural Politics, 2022
This article takes up German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s attention to air and atmospheres to a... more This article takes up German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s attention to air and atmospheres to argue for the influential part “objective” thinking plays in disseminating viral pandemics. It follows Sloterdijk’s broad approach to “air-conditioning” to interpret the way modern cultures increasingly work to explicate and construct objective figures of (and in) air. A fundamental, yet invisible, “anthropopoietic” element, air resists the forms and figures we use to describe it. This is acutely demonstrated by airborne viruses like COVID-19 and the pandemics they create, where the medial willingness to perceive or “figure” the air becomes a critical, everyday necessity. When Sloterdijk attributes the spread of “affective epidemics” to mass-media technologies, he draws attention to how airborne transmission is a symptom of breathing the same air, which, by affecting and altering air-conditions to reproduce identical figures all across the globe, increases its spread. This article will argue that the willingness to make air objective—in both senses of identifying
its material properties, and believing in a uniform or consensus figure—eradicates the possibility of vital difference. In doing so, inhabiting what Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior” of reproducible sameness that props up international exchange, modern, globalized culture becomes far more susceptible to the rapid spread of epidemics. Virality is increased by the sameness of objective air-conditioning, and by reintroducing difference into the atmosphere we can bring back its life-giving potential.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2022
This article emerges from exhausted readings of controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq’... more This article emerges from exhausted readings of controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s notorious portrayals of sex and sexuality to observe the relationship between the monstrous, the sexual, and extinction. Rather than dwell on what I call the “Houellebecq, pornographer” trope (that there are either too many, or too graphic, or too obscene depictions of sex in his novels), this article will observe Houellebecq’s troubling of what sex might in fact be. This requires asking exactly what is meant, in terms of demonstration, by “sex” – especially in the literary setting of a novel, which, compared with the explicit potential different media have given to twenty-first century iterations of sexuality, is relatively tame. In doing so, I will ask exactly what is explicit about sexuality, especially considering its technical changes throughout modernity. I suggest that Houellebecq’s attention to the depiction or de-monstration of sex, in all of its “monstrous” guises, comments on late-capitalist decadence and its extinctive trajectories – offering an ironic template from which to reconsider them.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture , 2022
In his article, “The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq” James D... more In his article, “The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq” James Dutton “reads” identity and race from the point of view of technics. Namely, he does so through the work of two nominally “Eurocentric” authors, Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, observing how familial and racial resemblance is a living inscription of “lost time.” This inscription comes about through the technical means available to and constitutive of the categories which bind them. Thus, instead of furthering unfinishable racial distinctions which only serve to support discourses of racism, this article follows assertions made in the novels of Proust and Houellebecq which read atavism as narrative—that is, all that could be reconstructed from the marks of any, or all, human history. In doing so, these texts emphasize how inscription—which comprises and “gives” all of culture, identity, and race—is bound to the interpretive futurity of reading, collapsing all sense of racial survival and extinction into the writing of remains.
CR: The New Centennial Review, 2021
CounterText, 2021
This essay reads Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End materially, to claim that Ford’s radically ‘moder... more This essay reads Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End materially, to claim that Ford’s radically ‘modernist’ style worked to refigure history on the basis of the literary mark. Ford’s innovative use of the material elements of writing allows his readers to approach history as materialistic historiography – a key idea for Paul de Man – that reads writing as marks and traces independent of fluctuating ideological abstractions. In Parade’s End, Ford’s narration avoids extra-textual context-building, instead sticking as tightly (and often bewilderingly) as possible to the interiority of a character’s consciousness. Notably, this technique interacts with the material world in a similar way to de Man’s approach to reading. This allows Ford to stage the ‘writing’ of history, where trace-chains are constantly refigured as material inscriptions, taken up and made sense of anew. The essay first interprets Ford’s attitude to history as a creative act, ironised by his protagonist Tietjens’ belief in the certainty and self-evidence of unified historicism. It then describes the ‘elliptical’ structure of one of the novels’ key scenes, where Tietjens is forced to learn the unfinishable nature of history–especially via written forms (like the ellipsis itself) that do not speak. Finally, it directs its attention to the tetralogy’s conclusion, ‘voiced’ by a mute narrator, that inscribes the potential for meaning to always remain in an unpredictable future. This ‘theotropic’ force cuts through Ford’s novels, and in doing so gestures to the ellipsis from which all reading has, always- already, been re-membered.
Paragraph, 2021
Writing remains. One could argue that it is precisely because of this uncanny and unpredictable s... more Writing remains. One could argue that it is precisely because of this uncanny and unpredictable survival that inscription holds an inextricable influence on culture. Deconstructive theory posits this as the ‘biodegradability’ of writing—that culture consumes writing’s intended meaning, employing it as fuel for its own survival. In this article, I argue for Michel Houllebecq’s awareness of this survival, suggesting that his texts stage their—and their author’s—own biodegradability to interweave truth and fiction. Particularly, he utilizes the ‘untranslatability’ of the proper name—its brief resistance to cultural biodegradability—to intercept and write into the future(s) inscription is tied to. This draws attention to the vital paradox of proper names, and suggests that their untranslatability forces every reader to conjure different, contradicting and often ‘out-of-sync’ histories. Houellebecq’s names, which necessitate an interminable coining, gesture to the inevitable (re)translation of finitude.
SubStance, 2020
This article argues for the importance of irony in Anthropocene discourse. It reads Marcel Proust... more This article argues for the importance of irony in Anthropocene discourse. It reads Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as portraying an “immunitary paradigm” that grounds human extinction, exemplified by modern “sustainability” strategies which seek to sustain private property and unequal distribution. In his novel, Proust depicts an “immune” class of hyper-privileged elites, and I suggest that, by reading the irony that Proust bases their existence on, we can rethink cultures founded on extractive appropriation. Irony is, then, the improper reading of other voices—those kept silent by a prospective extinction not written in their name.
Symplokē, 2020
I'll begin with a broad-possibly the broadest-question: what remains? More interestingly, however... more I'll begin with a broad-possibly the broadest-question: what remains? More interestingly, however, the reply should come: what doesn't? The so-called Anthropocene era foregrounds these questions not only in theory and criticism and whatever we do in "Humanities" departments, but as a central concern of "human" culture and politics. From the broad temporality that this era forces us to make sense of, our existence is surely dependent only on what it leaves behind. That is, it forces us to imagine our lives as the marks, remains and impacts we have left upon the Earth, without "our" infl uence to defi ne exactly what was meant by these marks. Our existence becomes radically deictic. But has this not always been the case, via the archival structure of cultures reliant on inscription? Claire Colebrook, one of the most prolifi c thinkers of the Anthropocene in the humanities, argues that what its hypothesis "promises" can never be fulfi lled. Inscription is non-biodegradable: the very techno-science and liberal-humanist archive that allows us to read the Anthropocene is also bound up with what the Anthropocene promises: there may well be no future, and there can certainly be no future for the private reading subject whose power has been generated from an earth that now is indelibly inscribed. (Colebrook 2017b, 127) All of the ways "we" make sense of the world emerge from this archive of inscriptions that spans, Colebrook suggests, "from Euclidean geometry to modern techno-science" (2017b, 127). It reads life from the marks it leaves behind, and thus, confl ates the two. The Anthropocene "intensifi es the Derridean concept of mal d'archive" (Colebrook 2014, 36) because it exemplifi es this confl ation, suggesting that the way we think of life-and its absence-is a matter of inscription. But by asserting that "human existence on the planet will be readable, after the nonexistence of humans" (Colebrook 2014, 34), it forces us to ask: readable for what, or whom? This question, the Anthropocene's most pressing one as I see it, upsets the "reality" of the world given to us by our archive. It is "indelibly inscribed" because, without these inscriptions, there would be no world-at least not a human world in the sense that "we" have come, through indelibly archival cultures, to understand it. 1 This point, that the archive generates our sense of the world, is central to Bernard Stiegler's ideas on inscription and retentional systems-an important infl uence on Colebrook's argument here. Advancing Simondonian and deconstructive claims, Stiegler fi rst forwards this argument in Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (2011, 14-21), and develops its complexity from different angles in his subsequent work-specifi cally, how "tertiary retentions" (2016, 42; 57; 183) inform the "hypomnemata" (2011, 76-77) of technical cultures and their "organological history" (2010, 34). 2 This falls under the theory of perhaps the central tenet of deconstruction: the trace. Derrida reworks this throughout his oeuvre: some of its most compelling consequences in his late work are drawn out on the question of a "fi gure without fi gure" like in Cinders (41-43) and "Biodegradables" (837; 854; 864).
The sumplokē of Narrating Voice in À la recherche du temps perdu
Textual Practice, 2020
This article contends with a primary, yet unresolved, problem in Proust criticism: just who is th... more This article contends with a primary, yet unresolved, problem in Proust criticism: just who is the narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu? Rather than answering, I seek to de-legitimise the ‘who is’ of this contention. Applying Derrida’s famous critique of ontological presence (parousia) and incorporating his notion of iterability offers a reading by which the narrating ‘voice’ of Proust’s fiction disperses across different characters even in the work of a sentence – a possibility invited by Proust’s elusive style of narration. Proust’s novel in turn foregrounds the instability of subjectivity which is typified by the iterability of language. As language organises to form a text, deconstruction privileges the interstices that work between words and engender context, or restance, and these become the moments of departure and appropriation for any Proustian narrator. In that regard, I argue that Derrida’s adoption of the sumplokē (the weaving, or conjunction of being and not-being that renders discourse) aptly describes the fluctuation in and out of appropriated ‘self’ of the narrating Proustian sentence that never fixes a static present, or presence.
Dead Write: Mourning Proust's Signature
Angelaki , 2018
This article presents a reading of mourning in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu from... more This article presents a reading of mourning in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu from the philosophical perspective of Jacques Derrida to imagine a relationship between death and literature. When he writes mourning, Proust works over an irreconcilable abyss – he writes the possibility of mourning, but never writes its completion. In fact, he dies before writing any completion; he dies in deferring it, opening up a mourning for his signature that he had already begun. The article resolves upon the consideration that Proust seemingly left his novel – when we create a fictive image of death, how can we imagine anything other than life? The literary dissemination of the signature, of every past self, presents, or imagines, absence as a dream of nothingness.
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Books by James Dutton
While Derrida and Deleuze are often held to occupy irreconcilable philosophical positions, both philosophers are equally relevant to an understanding of Proust’s philosophical significance, which fundamentally rests on his deferral of textual presence. Drawing on a range of conceptual tools from these two philosophers, including many that are often overlooked by commentators, Dutton shows that À la recherche stages a process of uninterrupted textual becoming, in which the distinction between the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘literature’ themselves is broken down. He reads textuality as constitutively unfinished, suggesting a new confluence between all three thinkers’ emphasis on life as an endlessly productive deferral.
Journal Articles by James Dutton
its material properties, and believing in a uniform or consensus figure—eradicates the possibility of vital difference. In doing so, inhabiting what Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior” of reproducible sameness that props up international exchange, modern, globalized culture becomes far more susceptible to the rapid spread of epidemics. Virality is increased by the sameness of objective air-conditioning, and by reintroducing difference into the atmosphere we can bring back its life-giving potential.