Of Stigmatology

Punctuation as Experience

Peter Szendy, Jan Plug

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780823278121
  9780823278114
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823278145
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

What if our existence is a product of its interruptions? What if the words that structure our lives are themselves governed by the periods and commas that bring them to a close, or our images by the cinematic cuts that mark them off? Are we, like Chekhov's clerk, who dreams of being pursued by angry exclamation marks, or Scorsese's Jake LaMotta, bloodied by one violently edited fight after another, the products of punctuation—or as Peter Szendy asks us to think of it, punchuation?

Of Stigmatology elaborates for the first time a general theory of punctuation. Beginning with punctuation marks in the common sense, Peter Szendy goes on to trace the effects of punctuation more broadly, arguing that looking and hearing are not passive acts of reception, but themselves punctuate the images and sounds they take in. Szendy reads an astonishing range of texts and traditions, from medical auscultation to literature (Chekhov, Sterne, Kafka), philosophy (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and film (Raging Bull, The Trial, Fight Club).

Repeatedly, what Szendy finds in these works is a punctuation that marks experience itself, that seeks (and ultimately fails) to bind the subject to itself. This is the stigmatology of the punctuation mark on the page that structures texts from ancient to digital, as well as the punchuation of experience, as though at the hands of a boxer.

Table of contents

• Cover
• OF STIGMATOLOGY
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Translator’s Note
• 1 Stigmatology
• 2 From the Rubrica to the Smiley: A Portable History
• 3 The Point of (No) Monument, or Tristram’s Cut
• 4 (Un)pointings
• 5 P.S.: On Restitching (Lacan vs. Derrida)
• 6 Phrasing, or The Holes in Meaning
• 7 The Dotted Lines of Auscultation
• 8 Monauralisms, or The Bubble of Quotation Marks
• 9 Punctum Saliens, or The Pulsating Point
• 10 The Point of the Overcast Stitch
• 11 Ekphrasis
• 12 General Chatter
• 13 Punctuation and Politics, or The Dot above the i
• 14 Final Survey
• Notes
• Index