Ulysses

Ulysses: Myth or Novel?

Cp. T.S. Eliot two and a half page essay on Myth-Making in Ulysses

Ulysses as Profanation

Cp. G. Agamben: “In Praise of Profanation”

• Sacred or religious were the things that in some way belonged to the gods. As such, they were removed from the free use and commerce of men; … 
• [If] to consecrate (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, „to profane“ meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men. 
• Religio is not what unites men and gods but what ensures they remain distinct. It is not disbelief and indifference toward the divine, therefore, that stand in opposition to religion, but „negligence,“ that is, a behavior that is free and „distracted“ (that is to say, released from the religio of norms) before things and their use, before forms of separation and their meaning. To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use. 
• [Profanation] frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it. The use to which the sacred is returned is a special one that does not coincide with utilitarian consumption.

Reading Communities

There are different styles of reading Joyce, and different types of communities are formed by these reading practices. One wonders how an ethnographer, anthropologist, artistic researcher would describe our reading community at HHU?

Here is a site on Dora García’s The Joycean Society, on a book club dedicated to reading Finnegans Wake.

Ulysses: Myth or Novel?

Cp. T.S. Eliot two and a half page essay on Myth-Making in Ulysses

Ulysses as Profanation

Cp. G. Agamben: “In Praise of Profanation”

• Sacred or religious were the things that in some way belonged to the gods. As such, they were removed from the free use and commerce of men; … 
• [If] to consecrate (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, „to profane“ meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men. 
• Religio is not what unites men and gods but what ensures they remain distinct. It is not disbelief and indifference toward the divine, therefore, that stand in opposition to religion, but „negligence,“ that is, a behavior that is free and „distracted“ (that is to say, released from the religio of norms) before things and their use, before forms of separation and their meaning. To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use. 
• [Profanation] frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it. The use to which the sacred is returned is a special one that does not coincide with utilitarian consumption.

Reading Communities

There are different styles of reading Joyce, and different types of communities are formed by these reading practices. One wonders how an ethnographer, anthropologist, artistic researcher would describe our reading community at HHU?

Here is a site on Dora García’s The Joycean Society, on a book club dedicated to reading Finnegans Wake.