The Strangeness in the Strangeness

Josh Cohen

Origin: Static Issue 07
Content: Text

Henry James’ famous short story, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ offers the exemplary narrative of catastrophe and its logic of depletion. The catastrophe is less an experience than an emptying of experience, the predicament of, as the story’s protagonist puts it, nothing passing. In this article, James’ story becomes the ground for a series of overlapping fragmentary reflections on catastrophe as the sovereignty of (in the words of André Green), ‘non-existence, anaesthesia, emptiness, the blanc’. Detouring into Freud, Blanchot, Laplanche, Kafka and Benjamin it loops back insistently – catastrophically – to James’ story.

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Contributor:

Josh Cohen is the Reader in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths University of London, and is the author of Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (Pluto, 1998); Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (Continuum, 2003); How to Read Freud (Granta, 2005), as well as numerous articles on modern literature, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis.