466 REVIEWS

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fs/article-abstract/72/3/466/4995856 by Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico user on 01 October 2018
Bergen emphasizes what Cixous has in common with a surprisingly wide range of writers in
a long list of ‘machines littéraires’ produced by figures as disparate as Pierre Guyotat,
Clarice Lispector, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Kathy Acker
(pp. 83–84). This has the paradoxical effect of blurring the differences between them, a
blurring that Bergen identifies as homologically at work within Cixous’s own writing: ‘La
différence entre la peau et la non-peau s’estompe’ (p. 97). Bergen’s emphasis on a sameness
underlying although not sublating the proliferation generally recognized as one of the most
distinctive features of Cixous’s work adds another useful layer to our understanding of the
conceptual complexity of the writer’s work.

MAIRÉAD HANRAHAN
doi:10.1093/fs/kny092 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN, The Man Who Walked in Color. Translated by DREW S. BURK.
Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017. 85 pp., ill.
Drew S. Burk leaps into colour — James Turrell’s and Georges Didi-Huberman’s — as
he embraces the mesmeric difficulty of the artist’s intellectual and material adventure,
and translates the art writer’s complex response to the painter’s treatment of presence and
vacancy in culturally shaped spaces. Those spaces range from archaic landscapes, through
medieval and Renaissance church art and architecture, to sites of secular modernity. The
journey is relayed through the ‘fable(s)’ of Western thought, from Plato’s chora, via
the story of Moses in the desert, to Heidegger, Freud, and Derrida. Burk’s translation of
Didi-Huberman’s L’Homme qui marchait dans la couleur (Paris: Minuit, 2001), like the source
essay, allows the flesh of words to express the flesh of colour and light, the solidity and
volume of fabled spaces, and the quickness and the obdurateness of material objects
and surfaces. Burk’s translation captures the limitless yellow of Didi-Huberman’s verbal
palette as it responds to the limitless yellow of Turrell’s Arizona crater landscapes.
Whether it is art that creates volcanic visuality, that reaches towards the haptic luminosity
of the Venetian Renaissance basilica, or sounds the vacancy of the Mendota Hotel room,
Burk’s translation reaches deep into the texture of Didi-Huberman’s thought and his
writerly style, as it travels the unfathomable spaces of Turrell’s art. The reader’s journey is
immersive, visually (through high-quality monochrome reproductions of Turrell’s work)
and textually, intellectually and affectively. As with any journey, the traveller accepts minor
inconveniences. There is the superfluous repetition of ‘[pan]’ after every instance of its
uncontroversial translation as ‘patch’, and the original French of other ‘visual’ terms is
similarly repeated (‘[visualité]’, for example); whilst this might be appropriate for first
instances, subsequent repetition feels over-cautious and becomes slightly obtrusive.
‘At bottom’ (p. 63) is rarely an optimal translation for ‘au fond’. But these are petty
annoyances. Burk creates an empathic translation: he is at ease in the transcultural and
trans-historical spaces of Didi-Huberman’s reflection and Turrell’s practice; his crafting
of philosophical thought and creative action in English translation is lucid and
supple. Beautifully produced, this book is an elegant visual complement to the original
Minuit edition of Didi-Huberman’s essay. Departing from the imageless sobriety of
the Minuit design, the book’s letter-press covers reprise one of Turrell’s azure–white
skyspaces, inviting us to enter the fathomless art before we encounter the essay. In con-
ceptual and material terms, the book emerges from the creative partnership of translator
Burk and philosopher Jason Wagner, founders of Univocal (2011–17), the independent,
artisan press that has made available English-language translations of a number of essays
in critical thought and cultural theory (Siegfried Zielinski, Jacques Rancière, Philippe
 REVIEWS 467

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fs/article-abstract/72/3/466/4995856 by Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico user on 01 October 2018
Beck, Michel Serres). This translation was one of the final projects of Univocal before it
was absorbed by University of Minnesota Press.

SUSAN HARROW
doi:10.1093/fs/kny081 UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

Le Scandale au théâtre des années 1940 aux années 1960. Par DELPHINE AEBI. (Littérature de
notre siècle, 63.) Paris: Honoré Champion, 2017. 421 pp.
The Introduction of Delphine Aebi’s detailed and wide-ranging volume asserts privileged
connections between theatre and scandal, claiming France as a national ‘terrain de
prédilection’ for scandal (p. 16). The book addresses an extensive corpus of plays written
between 1940 and 1970, and presents an at times overwhelming breadth of thematic
manifestations of scandal that move swiftly across chains of connections and across
authors. Whilst there is some brief engagement with the work of Michel Corvin
and Natalie Heinich on scandal (see Corvin and others, Genet (Paris: Verdier, 2006) and
Heinich, ‘The Art of Scandal: Aesthetic Indignation and Sociology of Values’, Politix, 71
(2005), 121–36), Aebi’s approach resists specific definitions of scandal as either negative
moral discourse or as necessary component of modernity. The three parts of the book
focus respectively on the authors’ use of scandal as a means of provoking a response from
an audience, scandal as accommodating narratives of conflict between author and audience,
and scandal as a regulatory force in the face of societal instability. The chapters include wel-
come analyses of plays by relatively neglected authors of this period, including Fernando
Arrabal, Marcel Aymé, Michel de Ghelderode, and Henry de Montherlant. Given the his-
torical period addressed it is surprising nevertheless to find little consideration of the scan-
dal created by the multiple challenges of the nouveau théâtre and its legacies to the formal and
narrative conventions of theatre and performance, with limited space allocated to Beckett,
Artaud, and Brecht. Genet’s work and authorial identity is present in discussion throughout
and read largely through Sartre on Genet. The careful analysis seems at times to suggest an
unmediated relationship between author (as exceptional figure) and audience that privileges
the written text, yet this is mitigated by Aebi’s detailed and coherent presentation of the crit-
ical reception of the plays discussed. The book’s diverse thematic foci remain impressive
even as the number of areas covered within chapters sometimes precludes detailed contex-
tualization of the specific socio-political contexts in which these scandals are generated.
Nor is there critique of the presentation of a form or trope (for example, dance, jazz, and
prostitution) as inherently subversive or scandalous. The book delivers engaging and illumi-
nating analysis of the frameworks of censorship in play in this period and a pertinent expo-
sition of the ever-present potential for the social and institutional recuperation of
oppositional discourse. It includes compelling analysis of scandal as spatial transgression, of
the presence of contestatory voices within the plays and of the texts’ own mise en abyme
of their anticipated, scandalized reception. The Conclusion asserts the study’s open ‘pensée
en cheminement’ (p. 395) in relation to the definition and function of scandal in theatre, yet
makes the provocative proposal that the critique of power present in the works of the
authors discussed in the volume can be seen as the last example to date of original political
theatre.

JULIA DOBSON
doi:10.1093/fs/kny084 UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD