Literature, Disaster & the Enigma of Power: A Reading of 'Moby-Dick'

by Eyal Peretz

This powerful new reading of Moby-Dick brings into play some of the most consequential theoretical developments of the last three decades in philosophy, cultural studies, and literary criticism. It takes account of four trends in innovative critical recent theories of power, as articulated by Foucault, Deleuze, Butler, and Agamben; theories of trauma and testimony developed by Felman and Caruth; the new thinking of ethics, articulated by Levinas and Derrida; and the new thinking of history developed by New Historicism. All four, the author argues, participate in a groundbreaking new elaboration of the concept of disaster. Moby-Dick's privilege, the author claims, anticipates this new thinking of the disaster and shows that it demands simultaneously a new thinking of the literary. Read from this perspective, Melville's novel can both be illuminated by these recent theoretical developments and, in turn, illuminate them, adding new and complex dimensions to their findings.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published December 19, 2002

About the author

Eyal Peretz works at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and film studies. His work is an attempt to redraw the relations between philosophy and the arts by examining various ways in which works of art and philosophical texts enter into a new type of dialogue in the age that has been defined as post enlightenment. This age, from the point of view of these interests, is characterized by two main intellectual projects: the rise of Aesthetics, thus of the introduction of the question of the significance of art into the heart of philosophy, and what has been called the critique of metaphysics, thus the critique of the logic guiding classical philosophy from Plato to Immanuel Kant.
His first book, Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: a Reading of Moby-Dick (Stanford UP 2003) examined the relations between literature and philosophy within this context. His second book, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses (Stanford UP 2008), dealt with philosophy and film. In the meantime, he co-edited with Emily Sun and Ulrich Baer The Claims of Literature: The Shoshana Felman Reader (Fordham University Press, 2007). His book Dramatic Experiments is a reading of various writings by the major enlightenment philosopher and writer, Denis Diderot, a transitional figure between enlightenment thinking and post-enlightenment. He proposes to examine the significance of dramatic theater for the rethinking of philosophy’s relation to the arts. More recently, he has published The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame. He is currently finishing a monograph on Leonardo da Vinci. Peretz is also the editor of the Yearbook of Comparative Literature.

Reviews

[Yifat]

white whale/wale/witness

by one of my professors at IU