The riddling between Oedipus and the sphinx : ontology, hauntology, and heterologies of the grotesque / Yuan Yuan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Yuan, Yuan, 1957- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Grotesque.

Ontology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (249 pages)

Place of Publication:

Lanham : University Press of America, Incorporated, [2016]

Summary:

The issue of the other has always been an urgent one, especially since the 1980s, when the political debates over race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, and post-colonialsim took the center stage. This work probes the polemic status of the other and the dubious nature of the subject from a heterodox perspective of an emblematic grotesque figure, the Sphinx - the mystical trickster and the guardian of sacred knowledge in Egyptian culture. In Greek mythology, Oedipus, the epitome of Western logos, solved the Sphinx's riddle with a single word, "Man." This evocation for the phantom of a solipsistic subject discloses, in effect, Oedipus' latent grotesque disparity. The book explores the encounter of this unlikely pair to inquire the riddling relationship between the singular subject and the grotesque other in the context of modern discourses of the subject and postmodern theories of the other.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction: the return of the grotesque

Notes. 1 The primal scenes revisited: archeology and genealogy of the grotesque : 1 the uncanny subject between aesthetics and metaphysics : The current critical scenes: figuration of the grotesque

Archeology of the grotesque: dis-figuration at the primal scene

Genealogy of the grotesque: transfiguration in different aesthetic modes

Conclusion: aesthetics of art and metaphysics of being

Notes. 2 The mystical encounter between the Sphinx and Oedipus : The Sphinx: emblem of the grotesque and the problematic origin

The Sphinx at different locations: transfiguration of identities

The encounter: fall of the Sphinx and rise of Oedipus in the Oedipus legend

Shift and drift between Oedipus and the Sphinx in and beyond the legend

The ontological mystery between Oedipus and the Sphinx

The riddle between Oedipus and the Sphinx

Conclusion of part one: the uncanny subject of the grotesque. 2 Reconfiguring the grotesque between the Sphinx and Oedipus : 3 The enigmatic Sphinx: the grotesque other in aesthetic speculation : Hege's symbolic art: a metaphysical speculation of the grotesque

Nietzsche's Dionysus: mythical desires toward the grotesque

Freud's "the uncanny" and the grotesque: mother and the other

Notes. 4 Oedipus obsessed: grotesque desires and the phantom subject : Derrida's hauntology: the spectral and specular other

Solipsistic desire, negative signification, and the ghost subject in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

The ascetic ideal and nihilistic desire: the disembodied subject and bad conscience in Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals

Freud's Civilization and its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion: between Oedipal rites and narcissistic desire

Conclusion of part two: the modern subject

Notes. 3 The subject of the other(s) in ontology and heterologies : 5 Oracles and ghosts: the dubious other in Lacan's discourse of the subject : Repeating after Freud and the sacred words from the spectral other

The grotesque: surrealistic images, poststructualist ideas, and modern ethos

The specular other and the imaginary subject

The linguistic other and the symbolic subject

The dubious other(s) in the unconscious

No other of the other? The wholly or holy other without alterity or difference

Notes. 6 From ontology to heterologies: a postmodern perspective on otherness : The death of God and the postmodern turn toward the other

Bakhtin: carnivalizing the grotesque in folk culture

Kristeva: abjecting the grotesque and the other in process

Anzaldúa: hybridizing the grotesque: the new Mestiza in ethnographical borderlands

Notes. Afterword: the cyborg: a post-human return to the grotesque

Notes. Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed April 27, 2017).

ISBN:

0-7618-6663-9