Four Exoskeletons and No Funeral

Bibliographic Data

ID4270895
AuthorsJonathan Harris (0000-0001-6102-0572, corresponding author), Jonathan Gil Harris
Year2011
Volume42
Issue4
Pages615-639
Publication date2011-09-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/nlh.2011.0047
OpenAlexW2142462583
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited14

This essay considers the exoskeleton as a metaphor with which to understand the untimely duration of the past within the present, and in a fashion somewhat different from Jacques Derrida's "hauntology," which persists in figuring the past as a dead revenant that haunts the present. Building on Manuel de Landa's and Fredric Jameson's rather different uses of the metaphor, the essay offers close readings of both Byblos, an archaeological site in Lebanon, and Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis as exemplary exoskeletal narratives in which the past has agency within the present. In the process, the exoskeleton also allows us to retheorize "context" as more than simply synchronic or temporally coterminous "outside" to the inside: it is, rather, a polychronic assemblage in which the past is very much alive

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Archaeology · Art · Assemblage (archaeology) · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Narrative · Poetry · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · History · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political Theology and Sovereignty

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