Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This essay excavates the “literary structure of ecocide” through a techno-allegorical reading of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, particularly its staging of the “still” as both apparatus and hermeneutic paralysis. It traces how Faulkner’s text performs a self-dismantling of literary production by interrogating the very machine of its own inscription – the writing that simultaneously intoxicates and arrests temporal flux. The “still,” functioning as pharmakon, materializes the double-bind of literary representation: it produces the semantic enclave of meaning while revealing literature’s complicity in proprietization logics that undergird ecocidal acceleration. Through Faulkner’s engagement with a “blackness” that precedes racialized binarization, the essay posits a “junctureless backloop of time’s trepan” where archiolithic inscriptions might reconfigure the techno-semantic plantation economy. The analysis surfaces an anterior “literary” dimension of climate catastrophe by identifying how hermeneutical operations – ritualized hunts, circular readings, and semantic proprietization – engineer the subject as ecocidal being. Mobilizing theoretical intersections with Benjamin’s “materialistic historiography” and Stiegler’s arche-cinema, the essay positions Faulkner’s text as enacting a dolphin-flip against both modernist techniques and the “era of the Book,” suggesting that the dismantling of literary apparatuses might open toward alternative inscriptive technologies beyond the catastrophic parenthesis of Western semantic enclosures.
Source: Culture as Text
Author: Tom Cohen
Institution: University at Albany, State University of New York
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid:
OpenAlex ID: W4410587185