SoE Voices seminar series: The Unteachable - a reading

The Unteachable: a reading

Ansgar Allen will read from The Unteachable (forthcoming with Anti-Oedipus Press). In this theory-fiction several misreadings of key figures from philosophy and theory are offered up, most notably what the author describes as a heretic misreading of some passing remarks Pierre Klossowski made about a concept he called ‘the unteachable’. 

In addition to its experiment in undomesticated theoretical reading (a refusal to observe disciplinary constraints and ‘correct’ takes), the novel also experiments again with the monologue. 

This literary device offers, rather counter-intuitively, a staging ground for multiple perspectives wound into its coiled narrative structure, wherein one topic can only migrate to another through the relentless peregrinations of incremental changes of focus. 

This is an experiment which finds (what Cixous envisages for l’écriture féminine as) “the very possibility of change” in one of literature’s more claustrophobic, unreasonable, and persistently negative forms. 

The monologue might even be described as the putrefying agent within what Cixous calls “the phallocentric tradition”, an internal perversion of its “self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism”.