Abstract
Challenging the purely instrumental and external relations between suffering, representation, and politics must involve rethinking the subjectivity of sufferers by way of addressing the internal relations between temporality and sensuousness, and between memory and voice. The forms and economics of subjectivity, voice, and memory sponsored within liberalism (and retained in many of its contemporary detractors), affirm suffering as topic or object waiting to be treated or dealt with, utilized or redeemed, and understood or rendered irreducibly other. In this scheme, the work of interpretation, translation, representation, and justice begins once this suffering has happened.
The extent to which the solution of theoretical riddles is the task of practice and effected through practice, the extent to which true practice is the condition of a real and positive theory, is shown, for example, in fetishism. The sensuous consciousness of the fetish-worshipper is different from that of the Greek, because his sensuous existence is different. The abstract enmity between sense and spirit is necessary so long as the human feeling for nature, the human sense of nature, and therefore also the natural sense of man, are not yet produced by man’s own labor.
—Karl Marx, “The Meaning of Human Requirements,”
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
The tragic spirit is a dangerous one, and its power is in the chorus, who do not interpret the myth for the audience … but, as the votaries of Dionysus, lead the audience into it, and in their enchanted state see its reality, rather than only the performance of the actors. True tragedy is a ritual of healing, which can turn “fits of nausea [at the meaninglessness of life] into imaginations with which it is possible to live”
—Anonymous, with quote from Nietzsche,
The Birth of Tragedy
To the finest communications we only lend a silent ear. Our finest relations are not simply kept silent about, but buried under a positive depth of silence never to be revealed. It may be that we are not even yet acquainted. In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood. Then there can never be an explanation.
—Henry David Thoreau, “Wednesday,”
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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Notes
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1990), 49–109.
Georges Duveau, 1848: The Making of a Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 207–8.
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Albert Bermel, Farce: A History from Aristophanes to Woody Allen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 61;
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See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Karl Marx, “The Difference Between the Democritean and the Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” in Activity in Marx’s Philosophy, ed. Norman D. Livergood (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 42–43.
For example, Dawn Rae Davis, “(Love Is) the Ability of Not Knowing: Feminist Experience of the Impossible in Ethical Singularity,” Hypatia 17, no. 2 (2002): 145–61.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114.
Iris Murdoch, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (New York: Viking Press, 1987), 31.
Harry Cleaver, Introduction to in Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (New York: Autonomedia/Pluto, 1996), xxiii.
Veena Das and others, eds., Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 21.
See Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor’s Handbook: An Alphabetical Arrangement of Concise Statements on Aspects of Acting (New York: Theater Arts Books, 1963)
David Krasner, Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
See also Harold Rosenberg, Act and the Actor: Making the Self (New York: World Publishing, 1970)
Tracy Strong, The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Place (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990)
See Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 2003)
Jack I. Biles, “An Interview with Iris Murdoch,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 11 (1978): 117.
See Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Marx W. Wartofsky, Feuerbach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 407.
Marx W. Wartofsky, Feuerbach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 426.
See also Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969)
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
See Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” and “Reply,” in For Love of Country, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 3–20, 131–44.
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© 2010 Asma Abbas
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Abbas, A. (2010). The Tragic Art of Historical Materialists. In: Liberalism and Human Suffering. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113541_7
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