Geschlecht Complex

Oscar Jansson teaches Comparative Literature at Lund University. He is the author of Graham Greene and the Conditions of 20th Century Literature and editor of Translating Sex & Gender. His work on literature and media, ranging from the aesthetics of national romanticism to affective modes of satire in contemporary fiction, regularly appears in publications such as Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap, Passage, and Canadian Review of Comparative Literature.David LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor of more than a dozen books, with several of them from Bloomsbury, including Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor, Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene, The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed, Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, and The Geschlecht Complex: Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology. He studied rhetoric at Berkeley, served as Harvard’s Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom, participated in an NEH Institute and the School of Criticism and Theory. He has taught philosophy, rhetoric, and cinema, and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, the New York Public Library, the School of Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt. www.DavidLaRocca.org

• 1. Contending with Untranslatable Categories; or, Inducing the Nervous Condition of the Geschlecht Complex (Oscar Jansson, Lund University, Sweden, and David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA)Appendix I: Unfinished Definitions (Jansson/LaRocca) Apter | Cassin | Cavell | Crépon2. Antitheatricality as Critical Idiom (Caro Pirri, University of Pittsburgh, USA)3. The Cruel Beast: Settler Sovereignty and the Crisis of American Zoopolitics (Brian W. Nail, Florida State College at Jacksonville, USA)4. Between the Body and Language: Narratives of the Moving Subject in Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic (Lauren DiGiulio, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)Appendix II: Indefiniteness, Geschlechtlosigkeit, Undoing (Jansson/LaRocca) Butler | Cassin | Crépon | David-Ménard | Derrida | Deutscher | Heller-Roazen | Irigaray | Malabou | Nancy | Preciado | Sandford | Spillers | Weheliye5. Collapsing the Gender/Genre Distinction: On Transgressions of Category in Woolf’s Orlando (Oscar Jansson, Lund University, Sweden)6. Gazing at the Untranslatable Subject: From Velázquez’s Las Meninas to Ellison’s Invisible Man (Richard Hajarizadeh, SUNY Binghamton, USA)7. From Lectiocentrism to Gramophonology: Listening to Cinema and Writing Sound Criticism (David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA)Appendix III: Genre Unlimited/Genre Ungenred (Jansson/LaRocca) Apter | Barthes | Cavell | Chartier | Crimmins | Croce | Derrida | Jauss | WellsAfterword: Trans-Ontology and the Geschlecht Complex (Emily Apter, New York University, USA)BibliographyAcknowledgmentsContributorsIndex

As someone who has followed untranslatability for many years, it is with great pleasure that Oscar Jansson and David LaRocca have brought this theme to a point of philosophical sophistication in The Geschlecht Complex—a brilliant, bold, and eccentric work. [...]themselves to a single (but impossibly complex) German word, a range of scholars from different fields of inquiry and analysis have nonetheless produced a collection that signals a new maturity in the approach to untranslatability. In that sense, it may (hopefully) be the first of many such works. This is a collection that bravely attempts to overcome the constraints of traditional scholarship in the hope of generating work that lives up to Apter and Cassin’s invocations to ‘philosophize with languages’. The very form of the book itself challenges and expands a series of preconceptions on this topic. It is a brave, well-rounded, and seismically significant publication insofar as it exercises what previous scholars have only prescribed and envisioned.