Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms

by Keston Sutherland

 
From Shakespeare to Beckett, the contradictory figure of the fool who possesses unexpected wisdom has been a popular and effective literary trope and rhetorical figure for centuries. Philosophy needs idiots too, argues Keston Sutherland in Stupefaction . This is a book about how idiots are created, how they are used, and the types of truth that depend on them. Sutherland examines how speculative and satirical descriptions of stupidity function in art and in argument. His examples include Alexander Pope’s dunce, Adorno’s philistine, Wordsworth’s mechanical adopter of poetic diction, and phenomenologist Michel Henry’s drunkard who rides an escalator to nothingness. Sutherland also provides an important new account of the figure of the bourgeois in Marx and a powerfully original interpretation of commodity fetishism as a satire against bourgeois objectivity. This unusual analysis of the trope of the idiot will appeal to scholars of literature and philosophy alike.

264 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2011

About the author

Keston M. Sutherland is a British poet, and Professor of Poetics at the University of Sussex.

He graduated with a BA from Cambridge University in 1997, was the Joseph Hodges Choate Fellow at Harvard University 1997-8, and submitted his PhD, titled 'J. H. Prynne and philology', at Cambridge in 2004. He has lived in Brighton and worked at the University of Sussex since then. In 2013 he was the Holloway Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley and in 2015 he was the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.

Sutherland was the editor of the poetics and critical theory journal QUID and is co-editor (with Andrea Brady) of Barque Press. His poetry has been compared to J. H. Prynne, John Wilkinson, and Drew Milne. His work has won international recognition: his major 2007 poem Hot White Andy was first published in the United States in a special issue of Chicago Review showcasing four young British poets (Sutherland, Andrea Brady, Chris Goode and Peter Manson); it has been reviewed as "the most remarkable poem in English published this century".

Sutherland has translated a number of poets into English, including Jean-Marie Gleize, Jean-Michel Espitallier and Monika Rinck. His 2017 book Whither Russia contains translations of Verlaine, Heine, Tasso, Hölderlin, Gautier and Toulet.

Together with his colleagues at the University of Sussex, Sam Solomon, Natalia Cecire and Joe Luna, Sutherland runs the Sussex Poetry Festival, an annual two-day celebration of anti-capitalist and deranged poetry and music in Brighton, UK. The Festival began in 2009.

Sutherland has collaborated a number of times with the American artist Stephen G. Rhodes. Rhodes has made shows containing texts by Sutherland (printed pages, voiceovers, recorded readings) in Berlin, London, Brighton and Los Angeles.

Sutherland has written many essays on poetry, philosophy and Marx. A complete list is available on his staff page at the University of Sussex. Many of his performances of his poetry can be heard on YouTube and on his Soundcloud page. A number of substantial interviews and dialogues with Sutherland are available online.

Reviews

[Dante]

"Every word must be lived and thought, by a strenuous effort; and of course, not only words but emphases, rhythms, punctuation, rhymes, line breaks and every detail of our experience in reading a poem and liiving with it must be the object of the effort. That is not same as saying that poetry 'is' cognitive. Rather, it means that we must become, always and again and again, the reader who makes poetry cognitive. I cannot always do that, I am often enough too stupid for it."

Sutherland's demands on the reader, his doubts, confrontations, provocations and schemes (with and against) initiated a long skirmish against my own philistine cognition (it has taken about, uhhr, three years to actually finish this off in any proper sense). How right it is to be wrong!