Appel à contribution
Chiasmus in the Drama of Life
Sous la direction de : Boris Wiseman & Anthony Paul
Berghahn Books
À paraître dans la série ‘Studies in rhetoric and culture'.
Nous cherchons des collaborateurs provenant de toutes disciplines pour le volume ci-dessus, le treizième dans la série ‘Studies in rhetoric and culture' à paraître chez Berghahn Books (Oxford et New York). Pour d'avantage d'information sur la série dans son ensemble, voir http://www.rhetoricculture.org/. Pour toute proposition, ou pour plus d'informations, s'addresser à M. Boris Wiseman :
Dr Boris Wiseman,
The French Department,
University of Durham,
Elvet Riverside,
New Elvet,
Durham DH1 3JT
Boris.Wiseman@durham.ac.uk
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The traditional view of chiasmus is that it is a lively, versatile, often mentally challenging figure, useful for supplying a memorable sententious note as in the textbook example provided by Quintilian: “I do not live to eat but eat to live”, for effects of comic wit and verbal display, pleasing symmetry and antithetical balance. In recent times thinkers in various fields have found chiasmus to be something more formidable and imponderable, and far more than an incidental stylistic and literary device, a structuring principle in many areas of life - social relations and exchanges, traditional wisdom - which evidently satisfies deeply felt needs or desires. The infant's game observed by Freud in which the young child threw his toy out of his pram, had it given back to him, threw it out again, and so on may stand as a simple instance of the vital function of return and reversal in human experience.
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Even when confined to its original literary sense chiasmus is increasingly understood to be more than a matter of local effect. Shakespeare, Rilke, Joyce, Beckett and Lévi-Strauss are instances of authors for whom chiasmus and chiastic thinking are of central importance, for whom chiasmus is a generator of meaning, tool of discovery and philosophical template. For the reader and interpreter chiasmus is then at the same time an important key to the meanings and thought contained in these authors' works. At every turn, one can say, chiasmus turns out to have a double nature.
But of course it is not only in literature that chiasmus shapes, generates and uncovers meaning: everywhere in the world we may find, once we are alert to them, what Ivo Strecker has usefully called “chiasmus phenomena”.
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Though chiasmus may be used trivially, in the world as in literature, it is sometimes the case that a chiasmus which may to a passing casual eye appear insignificant, pleonastic and redundant, turns out on closer inspection to be fruitful, to lead somewhere beyond its starting point, because the chiastic reversal involves a twist, so that although the chiasmus is bound to come back to where it started from, by the time it does so the starting point is not in quite the same place any more. Even a chiasmus that may to the lazy everyday eye look as if it is doing no more than state a balanced reciprocal relationship - A loves/hates/strikes B and B loves etc A, for instance - is not in fact a simple matter of symmetrical reciprocity but of a response that reinforces the first emotion or action and leads to more of the same and so on, escalating or bifurcating indefinitely in ways that can play an important part in the structuring of personal/social/political/historical relations.
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Chiasmus confronts us with experiences of reversal, with the surprising revelation that things are not what we expected; and further, that the truth is neither this nor that, but the combination of the two. If we say “No joy without sorrow, no sorrow without joy” we aren't just saying that no feelings are entirely unmixed, but also that one cannot exist without a recognition of its opposite. When Marx contradicted Hegel, saying that it was not mind that determined being but being that determined mind he was no nearer the truth than Hegel: both were right, or neither of them. The whole truth of the matter is in the two views, statement and counter-statement, taken together, and in their unending chiastic movement and interaction. “Mind determines being AND being determines mind” Chiasmus alerts us to whole truths that embrace and absorb apparent contradictions and paradoxes and half truths that may well be generally regarded as principles, to be defended or attacked.
The simplest and strongest chiasmi, like the couple I have just cited, go to the heart of the drama of life, which we would like the prospective volume to engage with, one way or another. One last example, striking in its simplicity and I think in its capacity for transforming the world if it were allowed to, is the expansion of the New Testament precept “Love thy neighbour as thyself” with its “missing”, chiastic second half: “Love thyself as thy neighbour”. The experienced chiasticist can see that the second half is not redundant but makes the important point that the first means nothing without it, points to the vital truth that we can't love anyone unless we love ourselves, and suggests the corollary, to be arrived at by another simple inversion, that the hate and destructiveness humans so vigorously persist in is in its essence and origin self-hate.
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Here we approach the territory mapped out by psychoanalytic thinking, which from Freud to Lacan and no doubt beyond has employed chiastic reversal as a means of questioning the accepted order of the world and arriving at surprising and fruitful discoveries such as Freud's important realisation that it is not anxiety that causes repression but repression that causes anxiety. The reversal of cause and effect, the reversal of propositions in general, may be used as an effective weapon in debate but also as a way to reaching a more profound kind of understanding. Lacan, building partly on Freud, realised that the unconscious receives messages in inverted form, an insight which suggests that inversion and reversal are indeed principles more deeply inscribed in human nature and the human condition than we can easily understand.
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In your contributions to our joint volume we would like you if possible to bear in mind the dimension of the “drama of life” and to consider that [if anthropology is to be a “therapeutic journey”, as Stephen Tyler has said he would like it to be and if, as Robert Hariman has put it, it is the task of the human sciences “to confront the forces of denial that nurture the catastrophic”, then] a fuller understanding of chiasmus and chiasmus phenomena of all sorts, and the practice of chiastic thinking, could provide significant insights into the true order of the world at a time when such insights appear urgently needed. Shall we cast aside scholarly modesty and reticence and make it known that we have important things to proclaim?
Anthony Paul & Boris Wiseman