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Syncope The Philosophy of Rapture Catherine Clément |
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Syncope: a fainting, a musical disruption, an elision. The Marquise of O's baby, conceived in a swoon, is born of such a lapse. The tango, with a dip, suspends a woman in time. Poetry skips a beat and compresses the world. Blending the lyricism of écriture feminine, the rigor of philosophical discourse, and the clarity of journalism, this book takes us whirling through the timelessness of syncope, the stop-time of music, literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. By disclosing moments of "syncopation" in the discourses of Plato, Descartes, Pascal, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, Catherine Clément critiques a certain operation of classical Western logocentric philosophy that always tries to master any fissure of uncertainty. She plays with the paradigm of syncope as it appears in medicine, grammar, music, and poetry. As she uncovers syncopation in Indian philosophies, Clément develops an anthropological account of ravishment in India and at the same time tackles global problems of power through various concepts of the subject. A study of absence among those who traffic in time, her book offers a thrilling look into the lapses where rapture awaits us. Catherine Clément has been a professor, a journalist, and cultural editor of Le Matin. Currently a cultural diplomat at the French Embassy in Vienna, she is the author of Opera (1988) and coauthor, with Hélène Cixous, of The Newly Born Woman (1986). Sally O'Driscoll is assistant professor of English and women's studies at Fairfield University. Deirdre M. Mahoney is a freelance translator, who is pusuing her doctoral degree at City University, New York. Verena Andermatt Conley is professor of French and women's studies at Miami University, Ohio. She is the editor of Rethinking Technologies (1993). 336 pages | 6 x 9 | 1994 |
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$36.00 paper
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