Louis Armand is an artist and writer who has lived and worked in Prague since 1994. His work has appeared internationally. His reviews, critical essays, poetry, fiction and translations have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Sulfur, Meanjin, Frank, Poetry Review, Stand, Triquarterly, Culture Machine and Calyx: 30 contemporary poets, eds. Michael Brennan and Peter Minter (Sydney: Paper Bark Press, 2000).
In 1997 he received The Max Harris prize for poetry at the Penola Festival (Adelaide), and more recently he was awarded The Nassau Review Prize, 2000 (New York). Louis Armand is a member of the editorial board of Rhizomes: Studies in Cultural Knowledge, an editor of the comparative studies Journal Litteraria Pragensia and founding editor (1994) of the online journal HJS (Hypermedia Joyce Studies). Armand is also an editor at the Prague-based publishing house Litteraria Pragensia.
ABSTRACT
Posthumanist Joyce
This paper seeks to examine several propositions concerning the relationship of writing, technicity and the discourse of “humanism.”
The status of writing in its relation to agency: what is it that writes in Joyce? In Finnegans Wake, Joyce configures a set of writing mechanisms which are described recursively, as a writing “body” that writes upon its own surface. This body assumes the function of both an agent (something which acts) and a thing.
Contrary to certain humanistic principles that centre the act of writing in a human subject, the Joycean “thing” adopts the position of a writing that returns out of the obscene realm of the Real and inscribes subjectivity as a fantastical interface.
This psychoanalytic idea suggests that the human is always a post-effect of a certain technological displacement within the function of agency, of writing. In other words, the human subject is not only technologically inscribed (written)—e.g. in its historical, cultural situation—but is also technologically affected—e.g. as something programmed through the receipt of writing, and in which reflexivity (consciousness) is in fact a type of cybernetic recursivity. Posthumanism is not a state “beyond the human,” but the technological invention of the idea of the human, in advance, as humanism.
The paper will examine examples of this mode of thinking in Joyce’s text.
In 1997 he received The Max Harris prize for poetry at the Penola Festival (Adelaide), and more recently he was awarded The Nassau Review Prize, 2000 (New York). Louis Armand is a member of the editorial board of Rhizomes: Studies in Cultural Knowledge, an editor of the comparative studies Journal Litteraria Pragensia and founding editor (1994) of the online journal HJS (Hypermedia Joyce Studies). Armand is also an editor at the Prague-based publishing house Litteraria Pragensia.
ABSTRACT
Posthumanist Joyce
This paper seeks to examine several propositions concerning the relationship of writing, technicity and the discourse of “humanism.”
The status of writing in its relation to agency: what is it that writes in Joyce? In Finnegans Wake, Joyce configures a set of writing mechanisms which are described recursively, as a writing “body” that writes upon its own surface. This body assumes the function of both an agent (something which acts) and a thing.
Contrary to certain humanistic principles that centre the act of writing in a human subject, the Joycean “thing” adopts the position of a writing that returns out of the obscene realm of the Real and inscribes subjectivity as a fantastical interface.
This psychoanalytic idea suggests that the human is always a post-effect of a certain technological displacement within the function of agency, of writing. In other words, the human subject is not only technologically inscribed (written)—e.g. in its historical, cultural situation—but is also technologically affected—e.g. as something programmed through the receipt of writing, and in which reflexivity (consciousness) is in fact a type of cybernetic recursivity. Posthumanism is not a state “beyond the human,” but the technological invention of the idea of the human, in advance, as humanism.
The paper will examine examples of this mode of thinking in Joyce’s text.
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