Thelyology: Apuleius’s Morphologies of Damage

David Youd (author)

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Title	Thelyology
Subtitle	Apuleius’s Morphologies of Damage
Contributor	David Youd (author)
DOI	https://doi.org/10.53288/0446.1.06
Landing page	https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-before-and-the-after-critical-asynchrony-now/
License	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Copyright	David Youd
Publisher	punctum books
Published on	2025-01-29
Long abstract	Proposing a new interpretative approach to Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, I attempt to shift the locus of deconstructive reading from the novel’s larger narratological structures to its smaller morphologies of bodies, words, and syntax. First, I retrace Derrida’s account in Archive Fever of the integral role of technical form to ontological possibility. As he reminds us, the signifier (the means of recording) reveals by repressing, producing lack even as it engenders the illusion of unitary wholeness. Against this semblance of completion, Derrida conjures the specter of radical alterity and irrecoverable loss that bedevil any archival endeavor. Archive Fever interfaces here with theorizations of late style: the tendency of the artist to turn away from resolution and closure as life’s close reveals its basic fragmentation rather than any essential unity. In both intellectual projects, the supplement meant to redeem the whole is twisted into a revelation of irreparable damage, and this logic of the perverted supplement can be said to condition Apuleius’s novelistic technique. Turning to Thelyphron’s autobiographical tale at the end of book two, I advance a mode of very close reading or “interpretive microscopy” focused on the intricacies of aesthetic form and style. At every turn, as my readings seek to show, Thelyphron transforms his narrative prostheses from archontic technologies of the self into the means of its undoing.
Page range	pp. 91–112
Print length	22 pages
Language	English (Original)
Keywords	Apuleius ancient novel archive fever psychoanalysis late style

Contributors

David Youd

(author)

PhD candidate in classics and critical theory at University of California, Berkeley

David Youd is a PhD candidate in classics and critical theory at University of California, Berkeley. His published work includes articles and essays on Euripides, Plautus, and Terence. His dissertation, “The Queer Art of Terence,” offers a rereading of Terence’s comedies through the lens of psychoanalysis and queer theory.