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A World of Corpses: From Hiroshima and Nagasaki to AIDS

A World of Corpses: From Hiroshima and Nagasaki to AIDS In reading selected texts of the so-called A-bomb literature or the so-called AIDS literature, my interest lies neither in rendering an aesthetic judgment upon what are called works of art nor in the objectification of such textual practices as documents, as the exemplary objects of a sensibility, epoch, positions Z:I 0 1994by Duke University Press. positions 2:l spirit, age, or discourse-“modernity,” for example-which could be subjected to the usual courses of historiographical predication, comparativity, narrativity, and judgment. Were such the case, it seems to me that a certain conclusion would be unavoidable: that the telos of a rationalist, technological modernity is repeatedly revealed in its essential meaning as apocalyptic eschatology nowhere other- for example- than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at Auschwitz and in the Gulag, and in the current AIDS pandemic. Such might be an interesting, perhaps even important, project; but finally it would remain within the confines of interpretation, knowing, and the understanding, in its aspiration to hermeneutic revelation defined and determined by its distance from, and therefore its relation to, transcendental subjectivity construed as possibility. So it is not a question of the positivist accuracy of these texts in representing and interpreting the radical incommensurability of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

A World of Corpses: From Hiroshima and Nagasaki to AIDS

Hover, William
positions asia critique , Volume 2 (1) – Mar 1, 1994
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1994 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-2-1-1
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In reading selected texts of the so-called A-bomb literature or the so-called AIDS literature, my interest lies neither in rendering an aesthetic judgment upon what are called works of art nor in the objectification of such textual practices as documents, as the exemplary objects of a sensibility, epoch, positions Z:I 0 1994by Duke University Press. positions 2:l spirit, age, or discourse-“modernity,” for example-which could be subjected to the usual courses of historiographical predication, comparativity, narrativity, and judgment. Were such the case, it seems to me that a certain conclusion would be unavoidable: that the telos of a rationalist, technological modernity is repeatedly revealed in its essential meaning as apocalyptic eschatology nowhere other- for example- than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at Auschwitz and in the Gulag, and in the current AIDS pandemic. Such might be an interesting, perhaps even important, project; but finally it would remain within the confines of interpretation, knowing, and the understanding, in its aspiration to hermeneutic revelation defined and determined by its distance from, and therefore its relation to, transcendental subjectivity construed as possibility. So it is not a question of the positivist accuracy of these texts in representing and interpreting the radical incommensurability of

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positions asia critique – Duke University Press

Published: Mar 1, 1994

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