Abstract
Alice Lagaay’s playful response to Avital Ronell’s “lamentation” considers what interjections might counterbalance the “ach!” of complaint. Moving from Ronell’s mention of the “ach!” of “Sprache” to expressions of enjoyment, wonder and awe (“mmm!” “ah!,” “wow!”), she begins to explore what lies between expressions of either “positive” or “negative” emotion: is there a place for the neutral? What might be the interjection of indifference? This leads to a range of discoveries, which, inspired by certain late twentieth-century philosophical leitmotifs (evoked through the voices of Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and Giorgio Agamben), sociological studies on recent generational shifts, and a typical French shoulder shrug, opens the way for a whole new field of thought: “BOF-ology.”
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Notes
- 1.
Barthes refers to the action of marinading in the context of a 1979 interview on laziness. See Roland Barthes, “Osons être paresseux,” in Oeuvres Complètes V. Livres, Textes, Entretiens, 1977–1980 (Paris: Seuil, 2002). Barthes also speaks of the “marinade” in relation to Flaubert’s painful practice of writing: “When the depths of agony are plumbed: Flaubert throws himself on his sofa: this is his ‘marinade’, an ambiguous situation, in fact the sign of failure is also the site of fantasy, when the work will gradually resume, giving Flaubert a new substance which he can erase anew.” Roland Barthes, “Flaubert and the Sentence,” in New Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 70.
- 2.
For Simon Critchley, philosophy begins not in wonder, but in disappointment. Cf. Simon Critchley, Very Little…Almost Nothing (London: Routledge 1997), 2. But one could argue that the two—wonder and disappointment—are, in fact, related, at least as polar opposites.
- 3.
Le Grand Robert de la Langue Française, Deuxième édition revue et enrichie par Alain Rey (Paris: Tome II, 1989), 45.
- 4.
Monique Dagnaud, “De la BOF génération à la LOL génération,” http://www.slate.fr/story/27079/bof-generation-lol-generation (accessed March 10, 2016).
- 5.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_of_a_feather_(computing) (accessed March 10, 2016).
- 6.
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
- 7.
Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosaline E. Krauss and Daniel Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 6, 13.
- 8.
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), 1.
- 9.
Giorgio Agamben, Die kommende Gemeinschaft, übersetzt von Andreas Hiepko (Berlin: Merve, 2003), 9.
- 10.
Barthes, The Neutral, 8 (my emphasis).
- 11.
David Bowie, Five Years, in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, RCA Records, 1972.
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Lagaay, A. (2017). Ach? Ah! Whatever…The Invention of “BOF-ology”. In: Street, A., Alliot, J., Pauker, M. (eds) Inter Views in Performance Philosophy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95192-5_20
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