The Geschlecht Complex

As someone who has followed untranslatability for many years, it is with great pleasure that Oscar Jansson and David LaRocca have brought this theme to a point of philosophical sophistication in The Geschlecht Complex—a brilliant, bold, and eccentric work. [...]themselves to a single (but impossibly complex) German word, a range of scholars from different fields of inquiry and analysis have nonetheless produced a collection that signals a new maturity in the approach to untranslatability. In that sense, it may (hopefully) be the first of many such works. This is a collection that bravely attempts to overcome the constraints of traditional scholarship in the hope of generating work that lives up to Apter and Cassin’s invocations to ‘philosophize with languages’. The very form of the book itself challenges and expands a series of preconceptions on this topic. It is a brave, well-rounded, and seismically significant publication insofar as it exercises what previous scholars have only prescribed and envisioned. * Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Review * Bristling with intellectual energy, The Geschlecht Complex brings together a number of brilliantly original essays and a carefully curated sample of theoretical excerpts in its exploration of the resonances and affordances of a singularly untranslatable notion. The Geschlecht Complex is many things: it is both syllabus and seminar, both a joyful intellectual exchange and a virtuoso homage to the examples of such thinkers/readers as Cassin, Cavell, Apter, and Derrida. Most of all, it is an exuberant performance of the key inspiration driving the thinking of the untranslatable: the conviction that the untranslatable is at once generated and redeemed by passionate ventures of translation-across genres, media, bodies, languages, and disciplines. In all these transpositions, this volume succeeds marvelously. * Pieter Vermeulen, Associate Professor of American and Comparative Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium * Geschlecht by any other name: that multifarious and ultimately untranslatable German word typifying in this volume a complexity and a syndrome alike -- its cultural semantics both vertical for generational kindred and horizontal for genre or kind; lineage on the one hand, typology on the other; now general species or genus, now specified gender. With this book’s erudite roundtable, we are invited to the second, collectively-edited installment of a productive -- make that generative -- seminar once convened to rethink the ramifications of such irresolvable inner difference: less as a definitional crux than as a blocked crossing, where impasse becomes surplus when confronted at the disciplinary interface of philology and philosophy, rhetoric and ontology. Giving new reach to trans-theory, the performative yield of category-hesitation in these essays is abundant, subtle, and bracing. * Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, and author of The Deed of Reading: Literature * Writing * Language * Philosophy * The Geschlecht Complex is a rare and undoubtedly important book in that it treats categorization as both problem and necessity for the production of knowledge. Indeed, utilizing and developing the notion of the ‘uncategorizable’ as an analytical tool, it collects a multitude of contemporary problems into a stereoscopic perspective (albeit in a non-unitary manner and necessarily hesitant of its own limits) on the age-old aesthetic problem of the sublime and the monstrous -- and furthermore, on the ontological consequences of those seemingly impossible categories. * Isak Hyltén-Cavallius, Chief Editor, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap/Swedish Journal of Literary Studies, Lund University, Sweden, and Associate Professor of Literary Studies. Linnæus University, Växjö, Sweden *