Journal Article

The Daemonic Life of Objects: Object-Oriented Criticism and Cynthia Ozick's 'The Pagan Rabbi'

Rockrohr, Dillon

2018

Overview

[...]once we turn our attention to the distinction itself, our manner of cutting up reality becomes problematized as it would make sense to think that the act of distinguishing is one which occurs through culture, through a subjective act of theory. [...]in the correlationist paradigm of distinction, one can indicate the unmarked territory of distinction but only through a process of drawing the limits of the subject; the subject draws its own limits at the point of correlation between itself and its other, the object. The life of Things, of Nature, cannot be captured in finite, singular soul-like essences like the correlationist or legal paradigms would identify but exceeds such finitude. [...]life's resistance and undermining of Law is not death but is rather an excess of life: a daemonic life that always eludes our grasp and is dangerous to us, so long as we comprehend reality within fixed essences. [...]it is these relations that produce thought and perception in the first place, as Shaviro explains with regard to Deleuze's assertion that \"something in the world forces us to think\": \"The object provokes thought without letting itself be thought; we are forced to think precisely because we have come across something that our thought cannot capture or identify, much less recognize\" (2014, 154-5). [...]though we perceive Kornfeld's becoming-tree as a suicide here, life nonetheless remains abundant, exceeding the boundaries that knowledge would inscribe, continuing in its dynamic play of forces.

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Subject: American literature / Atheism / Clergy / Death & dying / Deleuze, Gilles / Epistemology / Fathers / Fiction / Harman, Graham (1968- ) / Jewish literature / Judaism / Literary criticism / Literary theory / Modernity / Mysticism / Nature / Ontology / Ozick, Cynthia / Paganism & animism / Philosophy / Realism / Religion / Religious orthodoxy / Sanctions / Short stories