Pure Love: Reading The Wings of the Dove with Badiou

Year 2014, Issue: 40, 65 - 74, 01.10.2014

Hakan Atay , Hivren Demir-atay

Abstract

The Wings of the Dove, one of the greatest novels of Henry James, has been widely read to scrutinize the role of representation in realistic narrative. Here we will argue that it is dramatization, and not bare representation, which is at issue in the dynamic nature of the text. For us, James is in the pursuit of a literary mise-en-scène which would enable him to concentrate on the event of love and gradually all kinds of events in its purest form. When there is a question of determining the purest forms of events and relations in general, mathematical abstraction comes to the fore as the ultimate tool for thinking things through. French philosopher Alain Badiou creates a remarkable conceptual network to be able to present such a pure form. Inspired by James among many other artists, Badiou takes the set-theoretical terminology as a starting point and arrives at a full-blown theory of appearances where both the ontology and phenomenology of events can be worked on. Briefly, it is our aim to read James’s novel on the basis of Badiou’s abstractions and show how the characters of the novel, such as Milly, Kate and Merton, function to dramatize the conditions and effects of an event like love

Keywords

Alain Badiou, dramatization, event, Henry James, love, The Wings of the Dove

References

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