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Diving into the Crypt: 10 Theses on the Historical Materialism of Biddick
- Author(s):
- Eileen Joy (see profile)
- Date:
- 2016
- Group(s):
- Historical theory and the philosophy of history, Historiography, Medieval Studies
- Subject(s):
- Biopolitics, Historiography, Intellectual life, History, Middle Ages, Poetics, Poetry
- Item Type:
- Book chapter
- Tag(s):
- Intellectual history, Medieval history, Poetics and poetry
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6KH0DZ5H
- Abstract:
- My poetic Preface to Kathleen Biddick's book, "Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties" (punctum books, 2016), which is indebted to and adapted from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” which sketches out the exploratory soundings of a sea-wreck of forgotten histories that bears uncanny resonances with Kathleen Biddick’s own acedious and depth-charged historiography. Likewise, in also threading Walter Benjamin’s “theses” into Rich’s and Biddick’s conjoined soundings, I hope to make more visible the relations between Rich’s “drowned face always staring / toward the sun,” Benjamin’s “secret heliotropism” by “dint” of which “the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history,” and Biddick’s desire to “quicken” the “dead zones” and “absent silences” of the premodern histories that contemporary theories of sovereignty and biopolitics pass over as “before” and “then” (and never “now”), and which histories, as Biddick well illustrates throughout her book, always, uncannily and zombie-like, inhabit the present.
- Notes:
- Also available at punctum books: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/make-and-let-die-untimely-sovereignties/
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Book chapter
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 4 years ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
- Share this:
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