Abstract:‘It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.’ As Joris -Karl Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete, Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life. Holed up in his private museum of high tast… Show more
“…Mere gazing at all these could give one "a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience," "the pleasure of moving from place to place which in fact exists only in recollection of the past and hardly ever in experience of the present, [the] pleasure [that can be savored] in full and in comfort, without fatigue or worry." 62 One must agree with Ludmilla Jordanova's claim that while literature "has much to offer historians of science and medicine," it cannot be seen as having "direct documentary value." 63 For all the chronological proximity or coincidence, science and literature were writing different tales of exhaustion.…”
A phenomenon known well before the onset of modern society, registered as a medical term not until the second half of the 19th century, when physiologists and psychologists inquired into physical and mental exhaustion resulting from excessive work as well as that which had no work-related etiology. Such condition of the severe mental fatigue which entailed deficiency of nerve-force was defined by American neurologist George M. Beard as neurasthenia. Taking into account scientific studies of enervation, the article examines some late 19th-century literary treatments of exhaustion in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White to present them as peculiar, decontextualized cases of exhaustion for exhaustion’s sake.
“…Mere gazing at all these could give one "a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience," "the pleasure of moving from place to place which in fact exists only in recollection of the past and hardly ever in experience of the present, [the] pleasure [that can be savored] in full and in comfort, without fatigue or worry." 62 One must agree with Ludmilla Jordanova's claim that while literature "has much to offer historians of science and medicine," it cannot be seen as having "direct documentary value." 63 For all the chronological proximity or coincidence, science and literature were writing different tales of exhaustion.…”
A phenomenon known well before the onset of modern society, registered as a medical term not until the second half of the 19th century, when physiologists and psychologists inquired into physical and mental exhaustion resulting from excessive work as well as that which had no work-related etiology. Such condition of the severe mental fatigue which entailed deficiency of nerve-force was defined by American neurologist George M. Beard as neurasthenia. Taking into account scientific studies of enervation, the article examines some late 19th-century literary treatments of exhaustion in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White to present them as peculiar, decontextualized cases of exhaustion for exhaustion’s sake.
“…21 Following this, we, therefore, also suggest that to understand the power of secrecy means paying closer attention to non-state actors and specifically to those who resist state secrecy both in counter-secrecy positions, or, as we focus on here, in the co-production of secrecy. By focusing on the 'infrapolitics' of secrecy, the politics of those on the margins, hidden and away from the conventional understandings of the centre of power, we can understand the ways in which power is made and exercised not only through domination but through acts of resistance as well; a dialectical 22 or even a 'transversal' 23 process with multiple networked actors. As Louiza Odysseos argues, 'obscuring the agency of "the governed" in struggles against socio-economic [political and violent] disposability' is to fundamentally underestimate the power at work in these struggles.…”
In contrast to a view of secrecy as a tool of statecraft, where the game of ‘covering/uncovering’ dominates as the central way of interpreting secrecy’s power, we set out ‘secrecy games’ as an approach for understanding secrecy’s power and influence. To do so, we offer a set of three games to illustrate the more varied ways that secrecy operates and draw attention to the ways in which non-state actors use secrecy and shape its effects. In particular, we offer an analysis of: (1) the secrecy games of tunnelling in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the role of mobility as part of secrecy; (2) the secrecy game of camouflage and how stowaways blend in to facilitate access to global shipping routes; and (3) the secrecy game of maze-running and maze-making within urban warfare. Drawing these together, we show how secrecy involves a wider set of actors, practices, and associated knowledge-(un)making strategies than currently understood within International Relations. In turn, this expanded understanding of secrecy helps to make sense of the more complex ways in which secrecy is presented, used, resisted, and transformed – including and especially as a force that limits sovereign power – and, therefore, as central to what shapes global politics.
“…Though compare this description from Huysmans' (1884/2018) novel Against Nature :This collection of liquor casks he called his mouth organ … Des Esseintes would imbibe a drop here, another there, another elsewhere, thus playing symphonies on his internal economy, producing on his palate a series of sensations analogous to those wherewith music gratifies the ear…IHe was convinced, too… that quartettes of stringed instruments might be contrived to play upon the palatal arch, with the violin represented by old brandy, delicate and heady, biting and clean‐toned; with the alto, simulated by rum, more robust, more rumbling, more heavy in tone……”
Current debates in food aesthetics are moving away from a focus on whether food is art, and worries about the subjectivity and objectivity of taste, and towards questions about food's aesthetic properties, the cultural and social significance of food, our modes of aesthetic engagement with food, and issues involving cultural appropriation and the authenticity of dishes.
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