Wayne Stables
Biographic Data
| ID | 1340109 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wayne Stables |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wayne |
| FAMILY NAME | Stables |
| SIGNATURE | STABLES W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7622-7154 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
As if the Humanities Were Dead: Remembering the University
The song at the end of the future: On the (Mouse) People
‘The people’ haunts democracy, and the sovereignty of the modern state presupposes its will: the social contract of equal and autonomous individuals. But if the power of the state derives from this spectre, the injunction to conceptualise it – or to lay it to rest – faces a double bind. On the one hand, to appeal to a unified body is to reduce difference to the order of the same, at worst yielding to a totalitarian ideal. On the other hand, to ab…
What is the Matter? A Meditation on Illegible Writing
What is the Matter?A Meditation on Illegible Writing Wayne Stables (bio) Polonius What do you read, my lord?Hamlet Words, words, words.Polonius What is the matter, my lord?Hamlet Between who?Polonius I mean the matter that you read,my lord. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet1 If language speaks for a meaning, it must also be able to speak in the absence of meaning. If it speaks for an addressee, then it must also be able to speak in the absence of an a…
The Time of That Other Interpretation: Gesture, Symptom, and Rilke'sThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Giorgio Agamben opens his lapidary essay “Notes on Gesture” with a striking claim: “By the end of the nineteenth century the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost.” A little later we are presented with the consequences: An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate. And the more the ease of these gestures …
Action Time: Freud’s “The Moses of Michelangelo
Our actions, even the quietest, are liable to become occasions for inculpation. But what kind of action would remain immune to the act of judgement? Such an action is made manifest in Michelangelo’s Moses. Freud’s cinematic reading of the sculpture yields a concern with what Moses does not do. Neither the origin nor the outcome of an action proves decisive but rather “the remains of a movement that has already taken place.” Such a remainder troub…
Judging words: The Task of Criticism
Criticism is apt to take the existence of its object for granted. This article’s interest is in an attitude that takes criticism to be constitutive of its object rather than secondary to it. After locating this attitude via Hegel, at the threshold between Kantian and Romantic aesthetics, the article shows how Walter Benjamin risks its consequences. Benjamin adopts a stance towards a condition of lapse in or as the object, which is then revealed t…
Anselm Kiefer and the Sign of the Sublime
This article aims to show what happens when certain of Anselm Kiefer’s images are brought under the sign of the sublime – when those works are read as instances that confront us with the discursive limits of language and the transience of the present. Beginning with a consideration of the nature of negativity, the article then relates this thinking to questions surrounding historical experience, repetition, and memorialization. Taking thinkers su…
Nothing’s Imperative: Late Beckett
This article dwells on the imperative to say “nothing”, concentrating its attention, for the most part, on Worstward Ho. It aims to illuminate the imperative’s temporality as well as to account for its origin. It is suggested that Beckett’s late writing is best approached not by way of phenomenology but from what Walter Benjamin calls the “fundamental problem of the theory of language” (2007: 316; trans. modified): the question of the medial matt…
"An Image or a "Gaping Void: Proust, Benjamin, Bernhard and the End of Experience
The interest of this paper is to discover the precondition of experience. It is suggested that Walter Benjamin's meditations on Proust, as well as on the origin of the novel, lead to the verge of that discovery. A la recherche du temps perdu is less a monumental work of fiction in this view than the limit of experience – the intransmissible fact of the transience of the present – made manifest in writing. While in Proust transience gives way to i…
Kafka’s Intermediaries: Notes on Deferral, Gesture and Guilt
Kafka’s Intermediaries:Notes on Deferral, Gesture and Guilt Wayne Stables (bio) From a certain point onwards there is no return anymore. This point is to be reached. —Franz Kafka1 Intermediaries Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out, because of impatience we cannot return. —Franz Kafka2 There is a moment, says Maurice Blanchot, when impatience—the belief that ‘the goal is close or that one is…
Judging words: The Task of Criticism
Criticism is apt to take the existence of its object for granted. This article’s interest is in an attitude that takes criticism to be constitutive of its object rather than secondary to it. After locating this attitude via Hegel, at the threshold between Kantian and Romantic aesthetics, the article shows how Walter Benjamin risks its consequences. Benjamin adopts a stance towards a condition of lapse in or as the object, which is then revealed t…
Kafka’s Intermediaries: Notes on Deferral, Gesture and Guilt
Kafka’s Intermediaries:Notes on Deferral, Gesture and Guilt Wayne Stables (bio) From a certain point onwards there is no return anymore. This point is to be reached. —Franz Kafka1 Intermediaries Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out, because of impatience we cannot return. —Franz Kafka2 There is a moment, says Maurice Blanchot, when impatience—the belief that ‘the goal is close or that one is…
Kafka’s Intermediaries: Notes on Deferral, Gesture and Guilt
Kafka’s Intermediaries:Notes on Deferral, Gesture and Guilt Wayne Stables (bio) From a certain point onwards there is no return anymore. This point is to be reached. —Franz Kafka1 Intermediaries Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out, because of impatience we cannot return. —Franz Kafka2 There is a moment, says Maurice Blanchot, when impatience—the belief that ‘the goal is close or that one is…
"An Image or a "Gaping Void: Proust, Benjamin, Bernhard and the End of Experience
The interest of this paper is to discover the precondition of experience. It is suggested that Walter Benjamin's meditations on Proust, as well as on the origin of the novel, lead to the verge of that discovery. A la recherche du temps perdu is less a monumental work of fiction in this view than the limit of experience – the intransmissible fact of the transience of the present – made manifest in writing. While in Proust transience gives way to i…
Nothing’s Imperative: Late Beckett
This article dwells on the imperative to say “nothing”, concentrating its attention, for the most part, on Worstward Ho. It aims to illuminate the imperative’s temporality as well as to account for its origin. It is suggested that Beckett’s late writing is best approached not by way of phenomenology but from what Walter Benjamin calls the “fundamental problem of the theory of language” (2007: 316; trans. modified): the question of the medial matt…
Anselm Kiefer and the Sign of the Sublime
This article aims to show what happens when certain of Anselm Kiefer’s images are brought under the sign of the sublime – when those works are read as instances that confront us with the discursive limits of language and the transience of the present. Beginning with a consideration of the nature of negativity, the article then relates this thinking to questions surrounding historical experience, repetition, and memorialization. Taking thinkers su…
Judging words: The Task of Criticism
Criticism is apt to take the existence of its object for granted. This article’s interest is in an attitude that takes criticism to be constitutive of its object rather than secondary to it. After locating this attitude via Hegel, at the threshold between Kantian and Romantic aesthetics, the article shows how Walter Benjamin risks its consequences. Benjamin adopts a stance towards a condition of lapse in or as the object, which is then revealed t…
Action Time: Freud’s “The Moses of Michelangelo
Our actions, even the quietest, are liable to become occasions for inculpation. But what kind of action would remain immune to the act of judgement? Such an action is made manifest in Michelangelo’s Moses. Freud’s cinematic reading of the sculpture yields a concern with what Moses does not do. Neither the origin nor the outcome of an action proves decisive but rather “the remains of a movement that has already taken place.” Such a remainder troub…
What is the Matter? A Meditation on Illegible Writing
What is the Matter?A Meditation on Illegible Writing Wayne Stables (bio) Polonius What do you read, my lord?Hamlet Words, words, words.Polonius What is the matter, my lord?Hamlet Between who?Polonius I mean the matter that you read,my lord. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet1 If language speaks for a meaning, it must also be able to speak in the absence of meaning. If it speaks for an addressee, then it must also be able to speak in the absence of an a…
The Time of That Other Interpretation: Gesture, Symptom, and Rilke'sThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Giorgio Agamben opens his lapidary essay “Notes on Gesture” with a striking claim: “By the end of the nineteenth century the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost.” A little later we are presented with the consequences: An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate. And the more the ease of these gestures …
The song at the end of the future: On the (Mouse) People
‘The people’ haunts democracy, and the sovereignty of the modern state presupposes its will: the social contract of equal and autonomous individuals. But if the power of the state derives from this spectre, the injunction to conceptualise it – or to lay it to rest – faces a double bind. On the one hand, to appeal to a unified body is to reduce difference to the order of the same, at worst yielding to a totalitarian ideal. On the other hand, to ab…
As if the Humanities Were Dead: Remembering the University
Epistemology (9 works) · Art (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation (5 works) · Psychoanalysis (4 works)