“Revealing what cannot be spoken” – Gabriel Josipovici’s Short Stories as Illustrations of Transcendental Negativity

• Main Author: Werner Wolf
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines 2014-06-01
• Series: Revue LISA
• Subjects: Gabriel Josipovici; Beckett Samuel; negativity; metafiction/metareference; paradoxicality; metalepsis
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/5772

The present contribution focuses on Josipovici’s short stories and on the remarkable worldview they illustrate, which is characterized by what may be termed ‘transcendental negativity’: although Josipovici’s short fiction is historically aligned with postmodernism, the worldview implied in it features postmodernist scepticism only to a certain extent, for it transcends the negativity of an insistence on our “distance from understanding” by constantly gesturing towards an inscrutable beyond, by “revealing what cannot be spoken.” These “unspeakable” issues refer to central philosophical problems: the liminal experience of death, selfhood, the accessibility of the other and creativity. This article starts by giving an overview of characteristic features of Josipovici’s short fiction. This is followed by three interpretations of exemplary texts from his formative period, the 1970s: “He” (1977), the ‘self-begetting’ story of the creation of an elegy; the classic “Mobius the Stripper” (1974), which is his best-known story; and finally “The Reconstruction” (1974) as one of Josipovici’s most minimalist works, in which short fiction approaches the condition of drama. In conclusion, the essay presents a brief survey of new developments in Josipovici’s short fiction as represented by his most recent short story collection Heart’s Wings and Other Stories (2010).