Rebecca Comay
Biographic Data
| ID | 451821 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Comay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca |
| FAMILY NAME | Comay |
| SIGNATURE | COMAY R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
On Gaps. Is There a Politics of Absolute Knowing
The final pages of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia announce a particularly fraught transition. Hegel is describing a move from the concrete world of social and political institutions to the sublimated spheres of art, religion and philosophy—the transition from ‘objective’ to ‘absolute’ spirit. This transition is intricate, partly because, like all transitions, it works in both directions—in this case, from politics to culture and back again. Transition is …
Nihil Est in Imagine Vivum
Material Remains
Doris Salcedo's artworks seem to confront the challenge that Adorno expressed so brutally: how to commemorate a traumatic event which both demands and refuses commemoration; where all available cultural forms threaten to trivialize, sentimentalize, mystify, embellish, instrumentalize, or otherwise betray the memory of the dead; and where every attempt to acknowledge injury seems only to compound it. On the one hand, it is the task of art to comme…
Bodybuilding
This essay was written as a catalogue essay to accompany Antony Gormley's exhibition Expansion Field at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland in 2014 (published by Zentrum Paul Klee and Hatje Cantz). The question of how we speak about artworks connects to the question of how they speak to us: how can a thing—a hunk of inert, inanimate matter—make a claim on us, when does a mute object begin to call upon us, how does it activate our senses and feel…
Testament of the Revolution (Walter Benjamin)
"Our heritage was left to us without a testament." Hannah Arendt repeatedly borrows this formula (from René Char) to capture the predicament of revolutionary modernity. Without a testament, without any symbolic means of transmitting the event, there is no way to bequeath the treasure to future generations—to harvest its energy or even to bear witness to what happened. Here's the thought experiment: what if Char's formula needs to be reversed? Wha…
Defaced Statues
There is a wild iconoclasm that smashes statues, gouges out eyes, and uses the debris to build new, better, bigger monuments. There is a gentler iconoclasm that sees beauty in rubble, and finds in the spectacle of dereliction the consoling reassurance that life carries on. There is a more muted kind of iconoclasm that embalms and catalogues the pieces. In the museum, the things can be divested of their magic and put out of circulation while still…
Proust's Remains
May 01 2013 Proust's Remains Rebecca Comay Rebecca Comay REBECCA COMAY teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Center for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She has published widely on modern Continental philosophy, literature, and contemporary art. Her recent book, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, 2011), explores the relationship between philosophy and historical trauma. Search for other works …
“Adorno avec Sade…”
rebecca comay teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto and has published widely on modern European philosophy, literature, and contemporary art. She is currently completing a book on Hegel and the French Revolution titled “Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the Trauma of Modernity” as well as finishing a collection of essays on Walter Benjamin and psychoanalysis
Dead Right
Research Article| July 01 2004 Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror Rebecca Comay Rebecca Comay Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (2-3): 375–395. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-375 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Rebecca Comay; Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 2004; 103 (2-3): 375–395…
Adorno's Siren Song
Excursus on an Excursus In a lengthy excursus or appendix to the first chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment - a detour in a book which constitutes itself essentially as an extended patchwork of such appendages - Adorno reads Homer's Odyssey as an allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment. Odysseus himself would be the quintessential figure of homo oeconomicus, his voyage an extended business trip, his passions the usual affairs men fall int…
Gifts Without Presents
Excavating the Repressive Hypothesis
What kind of critical strategy is possible after Foucault's arguments against the “repressive hypothesis”? What space is left for oppositional thinking after dismissing the old dualisms of essence and appearance, nature and history, sexuality and discourse, truth and power, need and ideology? Does not every strategy of resistance presuppose, however secretly, a model of surface and depdi, mystification and enlightenment — in a nutshell, a model o…
Interrupting the Conversation
Liberalism without tears: “There seems no particular reason why, after dumping Marx, we have to keep repeating all the nasty things about bourgeois liberalism he taught us to say ...'(CP207) Rorty's mission is clear. It is to “continue the conversation of the West” (PMS 394) while resisting the teleological temptation; to maintain our “liberal habits” (SO 11) in the lapse of any philosophical convictions; to nurture the “hopes of the North Adanti…
After metaphysics
Gifts Without Presents
Adorno's Siren Song
Excursus on an Excursus In a lengthy excursus or appendix to the first chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment - a detour in a book which constitutes itself essentially as an extended patchwork of such appendages - Adorno reads Homer's Odyssey as an allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment. Odysseus himself would be the quintessential figure of homo oeconomicus, his voyage an extended business trip, his passions the usual affairs men fall int…
Interrupting the Conversation
Liberalism without tears: “There seems no particular reason why, after dumping Marx, we have to keep repeating all the nasty things about bourgeois liberalism he taught us to say ...'(CP207) Rorty's mission is clear. It is to “continue the conversation of the West” (PMS 394) while resisting the teleological temptation; to maintain our “liberal habits” (SO 11) in the lapse of any philosophical convictions; to nurture the “hopes of the North Adanti…
Dead Right
Research Article| July 01 2004 Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror Rebecca Comay Rebecca Comay Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (2-3): 375–395. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-375 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Rebecca Comay; Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 2004; 103 (2-3): 375–395…
Proust's Remains
May 01 2013 Proust's Remains Rebecca Comay Rebecca Comay REBECCA COMAY teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Center for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She has published widely on modern Continental philosophy, literature, and contemporary art. Her recent book, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, 2011), explores the relationship between philosophy and historical trauma. Search for other works …
Excavating the Repressive Hypothesis
What kind of critical strategy is possible after Foucault's arguments against the “repressive hypothesis”? What space is left for oppositional thinking after dismissing the old dualisms of essence and appearance, nature and history, sexuality and discourse, truth and power, need and ideology? Does not every strategy of resistance presuppose, however secretly, a model of surface and depdi, mystification and enlightenment — in a nutshell, a model o…
Interrupting the Conversation
Liberalism without tears: “There seems no particular reason why, after dumping Marx, we have to keep repeating all the nasty things about bourgeois liberalism he taught us to say ...'(CP207) Rorty's mission is clear. It is to “continue the conversation of the West” (PMS 394) while resisting the teleological temptation; to maintain our “liberal habits” (SO 11) in the lapse of any philosophical convictions; to nurture the “hopes of the North Adanti…
After metaphysics
Gifts Without Presents
Adorno's Siren Song
Excursus on an Excursus In a lengthy excursus or appendix to the first chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment - a detour in a book which constitutes itself essentially as an extended patchwork of such appendages - Adorno reads Homer's Odyssey as an allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment. Odysseus himself would be the quintessential figure of homo oeconomicus, his voyage an extended business trip, his passions the usual affairs men fall int…
Dead Right
Research Article| July 01 2004 Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror Rebecca Comay Rebecca Comay Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (2-3): 375–395. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-375 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Rebecca Comay; Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 2004; 103 (2-3): 375–395…
“Adorno avec Sade…”
rebecca comay teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto and has published widely on modern European philosophy, literature, and contemporary art. She is currently completing a book on Hegel and the French Revolution titled “Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the Trauma of Modernity” as well as finishing a collection of essays on Walter Benjamin and psychoanalysis
Proust's Remains
May 01 2013 Proust's Remains Rebecca Comay Rebecca Comay REBECCA COMAY teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Center for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She has published widely on modern Continental philosophy, literature, and contemporary art. Her recent book, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, 2011), explores the relationship between philosophy and historical trauma. Search for other works …
Defaced Statues
There is a wild iconoclasm that smashes statues, gouges out eyes, and uses the debris to build new, better, bigger monuments. There is a gentler iconoclasm that sees beauty in rubble, and finds in the spectacle of dereliction the consoling reassurance that life carries on. There is a more muted kind of iconoclasm that embalms and catalogues the pieces. In the museum, the things can be divested of their magic and put out of circulation while still…
Material Remains
Doris Salcedo's artworks seem to confront the challenge that Adorno expressed so brutally: how to commemorate a traumatic event which both demands and refuses commemoration; where all available cultural forms threaten to trivialize, sentimentalize, mystify, embellish, instrumentalize, or otherwise betray the memory of the dead; and where every attempt to acknowledge injury seems only to compound it. On the one hand, it is the task of art to comme…
Bodybuilding
This essay was written as a catalogue essay to accompany Antony Gormley's exhibition Expansion Field at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland in 2014 (published by Zentrum Paul Klee and Hatje Cantz). The question of how we speak about artworks connects to the question of how they speak to us: how can a thing—a hunk of inert, inanimate matter—make a claim on us, when does a mute object begin to call upon us, how does it activate our senses and feel…
Testament of the Revolution (Walter Benjamin)
"Our heritage was left to us without a testament." Hannah Arendt repeatedly borrows this formula (from René Char) to capture the predicament of revolutionary modernity. Without a testament, without any symbolic means of transmitting the event, there is no way to bequeath the treasure to future generations—to harvest its energy or even to bear witness to what happened. Here's the thought experiment: what if Char's formula needs to be reversed? Wha…
Nihil Est in Imagine Vivum
On Gaps. Is There a Politics of Absolute Knowing
The final pages of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia announce a particularly fraught transition. Hegel is describing a move from the concrete world of social and political institutions to the sublimated spheres of art, religion and philosophy—the transition from ‘objective’ to ‘absolute’ spirit. This transition is intricate, partly because, like all transitions, it works in both directions—in this case, from politics to culture and back again. Transition is …
Philosophy (10 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Art history (4 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (4 works) · History (4 works)