Reclaiming Southern Pathology: James Agee and the Biological Thought of Georges Canguilhem

• Authors: Joseph Kuhn

Title variants

PL

Redefiniując patologie Południa: James Agee i myśl biologiczna Georges’a Canguilhema

Abstracts

PL

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) Jamesa Agee, dokumentalna relacja o trzech rodzinach dzierżawców bawełny w pogrążonej w kryzysie Alabamie, koncentruje się na obrazie rany w przedstawieniu ubóstwa dzierżawców. Agee przenosi jednak ten obraz na grunt bardziej biologiczny, tak że lokatorzy postrzegani są jako uszkodzone komórki lub embriony. Transpozycja ta może zostać ujęta jako eugeniczna troska o patologiczne ciała z lat 30. Jednak niniejszy artykuł argumentuje, poprzez porównanie z "The Normal and the Pathological" (1943) Georgesa Canguilhema, że Agee redefiniuje patologię jako wewnętrzną skłonność do błędu (lub aleatoryczną możliwość) organizmu. Pozwala mu to zaproponować lewicowy kontrdyskurs oporu, który różni się od finalistycznych marksistowskich czy New Deal rozwiązań ubóstwa z lat 30.

EN

James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a documentary account of three cotton tenant families in Depression Alabama, centres on the image of the wound in its representations of tenant poverty. But Agee also transposes this image into more biological terms so that the tenants are seen as damaged cells or embryos. This transposition can be framed as a 1930s eugenic concern with pathological bodies. But this article argues, through a comparison to Georges Canguilhem's "The Normal and the Pathological" (1943), that Agee redefines pathology to mean the intrinsic tendency to error (or aleatory possibility) of the organism. This allows him to propose a leftist counter-discourse of resistance that is different from the finalistic Marxist or New Deal solutions to poverty in the 1930s.   

Keywords

PL

Dzierżawcy bawełny; amerykańskie południe; rany; organizm; patologia; błąd

EN

Cotton tenants; the American South; wounds; organisms; pathology; error

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego w Katowicach / Śląsk Sp. z o.o. Wydawnictwo Naukowe
• Journal: ER(R)GO: Teoria – Literatura – Kultura
• Year: 2023
• Issue: 46
• Pages: 153-168

Dates

published

2023

Contributors

author

Joseph Kuhn

• Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu

• https://orcid.org/0000000209380543

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Identifiers

DOI

10.31261/errgo.13353

Biblioteka Nauki

26057202