Irving Goh
Biographic Data
| ID | 171571 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Irving Goh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Irving |
| FAMILY NAME | Goh |
| SIGNATURE | GOH I |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Disagreeing Preemptive/Prophylaxis: From Philip K. Dick to Jacques Ranciere
The Melancholic Genius without Melancholia of Jean-Luc Nancy; or, Toward a Reparative Genius
This essay looks at the apparent absence of melancholy in the thought and writings of Jean-Luc Nancy. It is not an insignificant absence, given that Nancy does regret it especially in light of an intellectual history that links melancholy to the idea of genius. In other words, Nancy worries that an absence of melancholy might be a symptom of a lack of genius in him. This essay proposes, however, that it is possible that Nancy's thought and writin…
Affective Consisting in Lispector's an apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
At first glance, Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1969) might read like a regression from her earlier feminist and anti-Hegelian Passion According to G.H. (1964), given the female protagonist Lóri’s deference in large part to the male character Ulisses. I argue in this essay that any suspicion of such a philosophical letdown can be easily dispelled if we attend to Lóri’s attunement to affects and her immersion in th…
Deconstruction of Sex
Virus Is Other People
While we disavow or renounce the virus that is ourselves in viral cultures such as a pandemic or systemic racism, we envy the viral force of others who are trending on social media. In viral cultures, we tend to think that virus is other people, forgetting our own viral potential or threat. In any case, all viral cultures make us sick; if not, we make one another sick. And when a vaccine is not available, rest is all we have at our disposal. We a…
Insistence, or the Force of Jean-Luc Nancy
This essay recognizes the insistent force of Jean-Luc Nancy: not only his life force or his physical and mental fortitude in living through a heart transplant and other illnesses, but also his force of thought or his influence on generations of thinkers. The optimistic and resilient spirit of this force oftentimes finds itself reaffirmed in Nancy’s writings especially on freedom, community, the world, sense, love, and existence, as Nancy insisten…
The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject
This book proposes a theory of the reject, a more adequate figure than the subject for thinking friendship, love, community, democracy, the postsecular, and the posthuman.Through close readings of Nancy, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Clement, Bataille, Balibar, Ranciere, and Badiou, Goh shows how the reject has always been nascent in contemporary French thought. The recent turn to animals and bare life, as well as the rise of the Occupy movement, he …
Exscription, or the Sense of Failure: Jean-Luc Nancy, Tecuciztecatl, and Édouard Levé
In this paper, I explore the affective dimensions of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "exscription," particularly the affective dimensions of failure, or even more specifically, those of the failure to die at the right time, all of which I find bracketed out, or even "exscribed," in Nancy. I argue, however, that those dimensions, along with the sense of needing to die at the right time (yet failing to do so), are but an undeniable part of existence for …
Introducing Touching Literature: Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See
Research Article| November 01 2019 Introducing Touching Literature: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See Irving Goh Irving Goh National University of Singapore Irving Goh is President’s Assistant Professor of Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham University Press), which won the Modern Language Association 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglio…
Pikes, Peacocks, and Parasites: Lucilius and the Discourse of Luxury
No description available
Variations on the Reprise
Research Article| July 01 2018 Variations on the Reprise Jean-Luc Nancy; Jean-Luc Nancy Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France, and the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, and holds the G. W. F. Hegel Chair at the European Graduate School. Previous teaching appointments include positions at the University of California at Berk…
Le rejetof Luce Irigaray inThrough Vegetal Being
This essay presents a critique of Luce Irigaray’s contribution to Through Vegetal Being, one of several contemporary theoretical works involving a “turn to plant life.” Irigaray there adopts a “reject” position drawn from her intellectual life that she sees as well in plant life, still very much exploited and left to ruin in our ecologically conscious epoch. From that position, Irigaray is able to acknowledge and appreciate plant life as not only…
Special Guest Editor's Note: The Cry of Music
Writing, Touching, and Eating in Clarice Lispector: Água Viva and A Breath of Life
Writing, Touching, and Eating in Clarice Lispector:Água Viva and A Breath of Life Irving Goh In the essay "On Writing: Which Reveals Nothing" (1994), written almost twenty years after the publication of The Literary Absolute (1978) that is coauthored with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and which touches on German Romanticism, Jean-Luc Nancy would suggest that we move beyond Romanticism.1 According to Nancy in this essay, Romanticism, invested in a "mak…
Le Toucher, le cafard, or, On Touching – the Cockroach in Clarice Lispector’s Passion according to G.H
Le Toucher, le cafard, or, On Touching – the Cockroach in Clarice Lispector's Passion according to G.H. Irving Goh In this essay, I am concerned with the question of touch in Clarice Lispector's Passion according to G.H. (1964). As will be shown, Lispector goes far with touch in that text, transgressing limits to the point of even committing violence against an animal other. In that regard, her text stands apart from contemporary theories of touc…
More Than a Catastrophe / No More a Catastrophe
Jean-Luc Nancy is one of today's most important, prolific, and celebrated French thinkers. With a duly acknowledged debt to Derridean deconstruction, Nancy has gone further to give us postdeconstructive perspectives on community, freedom, existence, sense, touch, the world, and religion. In After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, Nancy takes into account a contemporary phenomenon with a global social, economic, political, and ecological…
Phlebotomo-graphy, or Phlebotomy and Writing in Flaubert
Phlebotomo-graphy, or Phlebotomy and Writing in Flaubert Irving Goh (bio) The aim of this paper is to elucidate the intricate link between phlebotomy and writing in Flaubert. Phlebotomy, that is, the old medical practice of bloodletting through the incision of a vein made by a sharp medical tool or lancet, is not at all foreign to Flaubert. As biographers such as Geoffrey Wall, Frederick Brown, and more recently Michel Winock, have noted, Flauber…
Posthuman auto-rejects: From bacterial life to Clinamen
Blindness and Animality, or Learning How to Live Finally in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G. H
Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G. H. (1964) takes up the themes of animality and blindness as modes of thinking and living beyond the limits of subjectivity. While the notion of animality was subsequently explored by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille plateaux and Jacques Derrida in L’animal que donc je suis, Derrida in Mémoires d’aveugle, Hélène Cixous in Écrire aveugle, and Jean-Luc Nancy in Tombe de sommeil were experimen…
Politics of Language in Contemporary Singapore Cinema: The Films of Jack Neo, or Politics by Cinematic Means
While critics have argued that the films of Singapore director Jack Neo posit a critique of the state, this essay will argue the contrary. In deploying Chinese ‘dialects’ his films may appear to give voice to the Chinese-speaking masses in Singapore, especially those who have been marginalized by the state's political economy, which clearly favours the educated and English-speaking milieu. For the Chinese-speaking masses, his films may even appea…
Rejecting Friendship: Toward a Radical Reading of Derrida's Politics of Friendship for Today
Plus d'un toucher: Touching Worlds
Plus d’un toucher: Touching Worlds Ryan Bishop (bio) and Irving Goh (bio) The equivocity of the English term “touch” brings together perfectly the idea of an agonistic, loving contact between the flesh of the painter and what Merleau-Ponty called the flesh of the world and the connotation of a singular style. – Jean-Francois Lyotard “Touches” (19) Touch exposes. A mere tap on the shoulder, or a brush of the skin, gives exposition to the one who w…
Touch Today: From Subject to Reject
Touch Today: From Subject to Reject Irving Goh (bio) Irigaray on Touching via Shared Breath In Entre orient et occident, Luce Irigaray argues that humans, especially those of occidental heritage, still do not know how to breathe properly. To breathe properly (and Irigaray suggests we can learn this through yoga) would involve the conscious sharing of air around us. What this sharing does is open us to the fact that the air we breathe is always tr…
The Passion According to Cixous: From Human Blindness to Animots
The Passion According to Cixous:From Human Blindness to Animots Irving Goh But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die (Genesis 2: 17) So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he…
Structural Reject
Structural Reject Irving Goh (bio) Three I believe that the final three essays of Derrida’s Writing and Difference ought to be read together. They can be said to constitute a Bataillean series, for there can be no doubt that the trace of Bataille features sharply in them. “From Restricted to General Economy” is self-evidently a text on Bataille. Structure, Sign, and Play,” on the other hand, may concern itself with the work of Lévi-Strauss, but i…
SingaporePharmakon
Taking Derrida's Dissemination and Monolingualism of the Other as points of departure, this paper seeks to inscribe the event of language(s) in Singapore in a time of disease, which has been the untimely dissemination of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003. As we will show, this event of language(s) can be said to take on an outline of pharmakon, which is both poison and remedy at the same time as Derrida's thesis in Dissemination go…
The Question of Community in Deleuze and Guattari (I): Anti-Community
The Question of Community in Deleuze and Guattari (I): Anti-Community Irving Goh University of Cambridge Introducing Anti-Community What this paper seeks to do is to begin tracing the concept of community in Deleuze and Guattari. The question of community is an apparent gap in Deleuze and/or Deleuze-Guattari scholarship. Yet that gap is not surprising, if not understandable, for the question of community is after all barely inscribed as an emphat…
Blindness and Animality, or Learning How to Live Finally in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G. H
Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G. H. (1964) takes up the themes of animality and blindness as modes of thinking and living beyond the limits of subjectivity. While the notion of animality was subsequently explored by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille plateaux and Jacques Derrida in L’animal que donc je suis, Derrida in Mémoires d’aveugle, Hélène Cixous in Écrire aveugle, and Jean-Luc Nancy in Tombe de sommeil were experimen…
Virus Is Other People
While we disavow or renounce the virus that is ourselves in viral cultures such as a pandemic or systemic racism, we envy the viral force of others who are trending on social media. In viral cultures, we tend to think that virus is other people, forgetting our own viral potential or threat. In any case, all viral cultures make us sick; if not, we make one another sick. And when a vaccine is not available, rest is all we have at our disposal. We a…
Insistence, or the Force of Jean-Luc Nancy
This essay recognizes the insistent force of Jean-Luc Nancy: not only his life force or his physical and mental fortitude in living through a heart transplant and other illnesses, but also his force of thought or his influence on generations of thinkers. The optimistic and resilient spirit of this force oftentimes finds itself reaffirmed in Nancy’s writings especially on freedom, community, the world, sense, love, and existence, as Nancy insisten…
Exscription, or the Sense of Failure: Jean-Luc Nancy, Tecuciztecatl, and Édouard Levé
In this paper, I explore the affective dimensions of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "exscription," particularly the affective dimensions of failure, or even more specifically, those of the failure to die at the right time, all of which I find bracketed out, or even "exscribed," in Nancy. I argue, however, that those dimensions, along with the sense of needing to die at the right time (yet failing to do so), are but an undeniable part of existence for …
More Than a Catastrophe / No More a Catastrophe
Jean-Luc Nancy is one of today's most important, prolific, and celebrated French thinkers. With a duly acknowledged debt to Derridean deconstruction, Nancy has gone further to give us postdeconstructive perspectives on community, freedom, existence, sense, touch, the world, and religion. In After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, Nancy takes into account a contemporary phenomenon with a global social, economic, political, and ecological…
Touch Today: From Subject to Reject
Touch Today: From Subject to Reject Irving Goh (bio) Irigaray on Touching via Shared Breath In Entre orient et occident, Luce Irigaray argues that humans, especially those of occidental heritage, still do not know how to breathe properly. To breathe properly (and Irigaray suggests we can learn this through yoga) would involve the conscious sharing of air around us. What this sharing does is open us to the fact that the air we breathe is always tr…
Becoming-Animal: Transversal Politics
Becoming-AnimalTransversal Politics Irving Goh (bio) This essay began as a response to the treatment of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming-animal in Deleuzo-Guattarian scholarship, in which there remains a general hesitation in considering becoming-animal's political potentiality. There are certainly Deleuzo-Guattarian scholars who explicate the concept of becoming-animal; and while they do not hesitate to extend its application to litera…
Democracy to Come
The Question of Community in Deleuze and Guattari (I): Anti-Community
The Question of Community in Deleuze and Guattari (I): Anti-Community Irving Goh University of Cambridge Introducing Anti-Community What this paper seeks to do is to begin tracing the concept of community in Deleuze and Guattari. The question of community is an apparent gap in Deleuze and/or Deleuze-Guattari scholarship. Yet that gap is not surprising, if not understandable, for the question of community is after all barely inscribed as an emphat…
Prolegomenon to a Right to Disappear
As the title suggests, this article takes its motivation from Blanchot's phrase of “a right to disappear.” For Blanchot then, it was a question of a right of disappearing from biopolitics or the subjectivity of the human to a spatial regulation. That question cannot be more urgent for us today. This is so when one takes into account the technics of the global “War on Terror” as directed by the American political-economic-military complex. Through…
Democracy to Come
SingaporePharmakon
Taking Derrida's Dissemination and Monolingualism of the Other as points of departure, this paper seeks to inscribe the event of language(s) in Singapore in a time of disease, which has been the untimely dissemination of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003. As we will show, this event of language(s) can be said to take on an outline of pharmakon, which is both poison and remedy at the same time as Derrida's thesis in Dissemination go…
Structural Reject
Structural Reject Irving Goh (bio) Three I believe that the final three essays of Derrida’s Writing and Difference ought to be read together. They can be said to constitute a Bataillean series, for there can be no doubt that the trace of Bataille features sharply in them. “From Restricted to General Economy” is self-evidently a text on Bataille. Structure, Sign, and Play,” on the other hand, may concern itself with the work of Lévi-Strauss, but i…
Becoming-Animal: Transversal Politics
Becoming-AnimalTransversal Politics Irving Goh (bio) This essay began as a response to the treatment of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming-animal in Deleuzo-Guattarian scholarship, in which there remains a general hesitation in considering becoming-animal's political potentiality. There are certainly Deleuzo-Guattarian scholars who explicate the concept of becoming-animal; and while they do not hesitate to extend its application to litera…
The Passion According to Cixous: From Human Blindness to Animots
The Passion According to Cixous:From Human Blindness to Animots Irving Goh But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die (Genesis 2: 17) So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he…
Politics of Language in Contemporary Singapore Cinema: The Films of Jack Neo, or Politics by Cinematic Means
While critics have argued that the films of Singapore director Jack Neo posit a critique of the state, this essay will argue the contrary. In deploying Chinese ‘dialects’ his films may appear to give voice to the Chinese-speaking masses in Singapore, especially those who have been marginalized by the state's political economy, which clearly favours the educated and English-speaking milieu. For the Chinese-speaking masses, his films may even appea…
Rejecting Friendship: Toward a Radical Reading of Derrida's Politics of Friendship for Today
Plus d'un toucher: Touching Worlds
Plus d’un toucher: Touching Worlds Ryan Bishop (bio) and Irving Goh (bio) The equivocity of the English term “touch” brings together perfectly the idea of an agonistic, loving contact between the flesh of the painter and what Merleau-Ponty called the flesh of the world and the connotation of a singular style. – Jean-Francois Lyotard “Touches” (19) Touch exposes. A mere tap on the shoulder, or a brush of the skin, gives exposition to the one who w…
Touch Today: From Subject to Reject
Touch Today: From Subject to Reject Irving Goh (bio) Irigaray on Touching via Shared Breath In Entre orient et occident, Luce Irigaray argues that humans, especially those of occidental heritage, still do not know how to breathe properly. To breathe properly (and Irigaray suggests we can learn this through yoga) would involve the conscious sharing of air around us. What this sharing does is open us to the fact that the air we breathe is always tr…
Posthuman auto-rejects: From bacterial life to Clinamen
Blindness and Animality, or Learning How to Live Finally in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G. H
Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G. H. (1964) takes up the themes of animality and blindness as modes of thinking and living beyond the limits of subjectivity. While the notion of animality was subsequently explored by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille plateaux and Jacques Derrida in L’animal que donc je suis, Derrida in Mémoires d’aveugle, Hélène Cixous in Écrire aveugle, and Jean-Luc Nancy in Tombe de sommeil were experimen…
Phlebotomo-graphy, or Phlebotomy and Writing in Flaubert
Phlebotomo-graphy, or Phlebotomy and Writing in Flaubert Irving Goh (bio) The aim of this paper is to elucidate the intricate link between phlebotomy and writing in Flaubert. Phlebotomy, that is, the old medical practice of bloodletting through the incision of a vein made by a sharp medical tool or lancet, is not at all foreign to Flaubert. As biographers such as Geoffrey Wall, Frederick Brown, and more recently Michel Winock, have noted, Flauber…
Writing, Touching, and Eating in Clarice Lispector: Água Viva and A Breath of Life
Writing, Touching, and Eating in Clarice Lispector:Água Viva and A Breath of Life Irving Goh In the essay "On Writing: Which Reveals Nothing" (1994), written almost twenty years after the publication of The Literary Absolute (1978) that is coauthored with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and which touches on German Romanticism, Jean-Luc Nancy would suggest that we move beyond Romanticism.1 According to Nancy in this essay, Romanticism, invested in a "mak…
Le Toucher, le cafard, or, On Touching – the Cockroach in Clarice Lispector’s Passion according to G.H
Le Toucher, le cafard, or, On Touching – the Cockroach in Clarice Lispector's Passion according to G.H. Irving Goh In this essay, I am concerned with the question of touch in Clarice Lispector's Passion according to G.H. (1964). As will be shown, Lispector goes far with touch in that text, transgressing limits to the point of even committing violence against an animal other. In that regard, her text stands apart from contemporary theories of touc…
More Than a Catastrophe / No More a Catastrophe
Jean-Luc Nancy is one of today's most important, prolific, and celebrated French thinkers. With a duly acknowledged debt to Derridean deconstruction, Nancy has gone further to give us postdeconstructive perspectives on community, freedom, existence, sense, touch, the world, and religion. In After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, Nancy takes into account a contemporary phenomenon with a global social, economic, political, and ecological…
Pikes, Peacocks, and Parasites: Lucilius and the Discourse of Luxury
No description available
Variations on the Reprise
Research Article| July 01 2018 Variations on the Reprise Jean-Luc Nancy; Jean-Luc Nancy Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France, and the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, and holds the G. W. F. Hegel Chair at the European Graduate School. Previous teaching appointments include positions at the University of California at Berk…
Le rejetof Luce Irigaray inThrough Vegetal Being
This essay presents a critique of Luce Irigaray’s contribution to Through Vegetal Being, one of several contemporary theoretical works involving a “turn to plant life.” Irigaray there adopts a “reject” position drawn from her intellectual life that she sees as well in plant life, still very much exploited and left to ruin in our ecologically conscious epoch. From that position, Irigaray is able to acknowledge and appreciate plant life as not only…
Special Guest Editor's Note: The Cry of Music
Exscription, or the Sense of Failure: Jean-Luc Nancy, Tecuciztecatl, and Édouard Levé
In this paper, I explore the affective dimensions of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "exscription," particularly the affective dimensions of failure, or even more specifically, those of the failure to die at the right time, all of which I find bracketed out, or even "exscribed," in Nancy. I argue, however, that those dimensions, along with the sense of needing to die at the right time (yet failing to do so), are but an undeniable part of existence for …
Introducing Touching Literature: Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See
Research Article| November 01 2019 Introducing Touching Literature: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See Irving Goh Irving Goh National University of Singapore Irving Goh is President’s Assistant Professor of Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham University Press), which won the Modern Language Association 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglio…
The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject
This book proposes a theory of the reject, a more adequate figure than the subject for thinking friendship, love, community, democracy, the postsecular, and the posthuman.Through close readings of Nancy, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Clement, Bataille, Balibar, Ranciere, and Badiou, Goh shows how the reject has always been nascent in contemporary French thought. The recent turn to animals and bare life, as well as the rise of the Occupy movement, he …
Deconstruction of Sex
Philosophy (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Art (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (9 works) · Politics (8 works)