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= A. Samuel Kimball =

Arthur Samuel Kimball (b. 1950) is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, where he taught for 33 years (1988-2021). He is the author of the cross-disciplinary work of cultural theory, The Infanticidal Logic of Evolution and Culture (2007), which shows how the western world has tacitly negotiated the deconstructive implications of the struggle to survive in a Darwinian world—that is, in a world in which living things are subject to death and are themselves the source of the death of other living things, such that the economy of life is inescapably infanticidal. He has also written numerous articles on the nature of the infanticidal in American literature (Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Toni Morrison’s Beloved), in film (Matrix, Terminator 2, Alien Resurrection, Pulp Fiction, Twin Peaks, Chinatown, Crash, Fog of War, Tyson), and in other works of literature as well as of theory.

Education and Career
Arthur Samuel Kimball attended Reed College (1969-71), graduated with a B.A. in English from Linfield College (1973), and earned an M.A. in English from the University of Washington (1975). He studied clinical psychology at Portland State University, where Gregory Goekjian introduced him to Derrida’s Of Grammatology. In 1984 he and his wife moved to Gainesville, Florida, where he entered the doctoral program in English at the University of Florida, initially to study under the psychoanalytic literary critic, Norman N. Holland. There he sought out the tutelage of the Derridean scholar and translator, John P. Leavey, who supervised his dissertation, “Amimesis and the Signature: Grammatological Openings in The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick.” After completing the Ph.D., he began teaching at the University of North Florida in 1988. During his subsequent 33-year career, he was twice promoted (from Assistant to Associate and Associate to full Professor) and served as chair of the Department of English for five years and as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for four years. He retired in 2021.

The Infanticidal "Logic" of Evolution and Culture
In 1973, by way of the works of the Canadian psychologist David Bakan, Kimball began exploring the theme of infant and child jeopardy in literature, the surprising number of allusions to infanticide throughout the Bible, and Freud’s psychoanalysis-founding focus on the violence of Oedipus rather than on that of Laius. The subject of such cross-generational violence against children thereafter became Kimball’s central scholarly concern. Drawing on psychoanalysis, the work of René Girard on scapegoat violence, the logical conundrum of the Cretan Liar Paradox, Richard Dawkins’ theories of the so-called selfish gene and the extended phenotype, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s research on animal infanticide, and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading protocols, he has endeavored to elucidate the logical form, in contrast to the empirical manifestations, of that which is infanticidal. Whereas empirical infanticide manifests in the death of a child, that which is infanticidal can be happening without anyone knowing it—that is, can be in the process of occurring covertly, by degrees, in highly indirect or displaced manner, and with its harmful and injurious effects accumulating by undetectable degrees. (For a striking example in film, see reference below, which includes a spoiler alert.) It is a general feature of childhood, of course, that people may be subject to any number of infanticidal threats without being aware of what or who has endangered them or how they have been in jeopardy or peril; and thus that adults can have no memory or evidence of their infanticidal vulnerability.

In The Infanticidal Logic of Evolution and Culture (2007), Kimball puts forward three principal claims. The first concerns the economy of evolution—“there is no free lunch,” as E. O. Wilson has emphasized; “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson declares; “The history of the world, my Sweet, is who gets eaten, who gets to eat,” as Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd declares. Kimball’s initial claim, then, is that the evolutionary economy can be summarized as follows: “existence costs”; this costliness is inescapable; it is implicitly infanticidal; and this non-obvious, even counter-intuitive implication is internal to and operative in the referents of the central concepts of evolutionary theory—for example, survival, reproductive fitness and success, parental investment, adaptation, evolutionary traps, and the genetic “unit” of natural selection.

The second claim is that the evolutionary economy is, contrary to the realist presuppositions of many evolutionary scientists, deconstructive and that it requires Derridean protocols to account for why existence costs such that life is not purely alive, is not simply living, but should be understood as lifedeath, where the infanticidal is a near synonym for this characterization of the evolutionary economy.

The third claim is that some of the most cherished, heritage-defining narratives of the Judaic, Greek, and Christian traditions (for example, the Genesis account of the first sin and the narrative of Abraham and Isaac, the Odyssey, Oedipus the King, the New Testament Eucharist ceremony, and the account of the two portents in Revelation 12) have attempted to understand what Western culture has protected itself from explicitly and self-critically confronting about humankind’s history of violence against its own kind—namely, that human consciousness occurs within an evolutionary economy in which life is sacrificial of life, and in which the infanticidal is the condition of the possibility of human culture, including of what has been regarded as the sacred.

This conclusion points to the stakes of Kimball’s work, which can be framed in terms of the question: since existence costs; since, therefore, consciousness costs; since, in further consequence, all decision costs; in other words, since there is no way of transcending the sacrifices involved in any allocation of scarce resources; and since there is no way of escaping the fact that every decision not only sets in motion various possible futures but also forecloses incalculable other, now no longer possible futures—what then is the task of our species?

Continuing to work toward a comprehensive answer, Kimball has extended what he calls his counter- or contra-conceptive (more simply, contraceptive) demonstrations of his three claims in his other published work—in his Girardian reading of Josephine Hart’s Sin as well as in his deconstructive writings on mimesis, consciousness, the enigma of a “we” not modeled on the “I,” and various literary texts and film.

Books

 * 2007. The Infanticidal Logic of Evolution and Culture, University of Delaware Press. ISBN 0-87413-952-X

Book Chapters

 * 2020. “The Infanticidal Logic of Mimesis as Horizon of the Imaginable.” Ch. 9 in Imagination and art : explorations in contemporary theory. Ed. Keith Moser and Ananta Ch. Sukla. Brill Rodopi. ISBN 978-90-04-43635-0
 * 2019. “A We Not Modeled on the I, the Law of Law, and Futurity.” Chapter 5 in Law's Sacrifice: Approaching the Problem of Sacrifice in Law, Literature, and Philosophy. Ed. Brian Nail and Jeffrey Ellsworth. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-03-67-78515-4
 * 2015. “Literature, Fictionality, and the Illusion of Self-Presence.” Fiction and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory. Ed. Ananta Ch. Sukla. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1472575036
 * 2015. “Fiction and Emotion: The Relation of Consciousness to the Economy of Evolution.” Fiction and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory. Ed. Ananta Ch. Sukla. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1472575036
 * 2008. “The Linguistic Turn, First-Person Experience, and the Terror of Relativism: ‘The Purloined Letter’ and the Affective Limits of Ratiocination.” Approaches to Teaching Poe. Ed. Tony Magistrale and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. New York: MLA. ISBN 978-16-03-29012-8
 * 2005. “Travel, Travail, and the Biblical Itinerary of the Word: The Contrasting Examples of Poe and Melville.” Les écrivains en voyage: Nouveaux mondes, nouvelles idées? (Writers and Their Travels: New Worlds, New Ideas?). Ed. Sharon Fuller. Cahiers du CIRHiLL, no. 28. Paris: L’Harmattan). ISBN 978-27-47-59138-6
 * 2004. “Contraceiving the Truth in The Scarlet Letter.” Le fonction éthique de l’oeuvre: Le cas de Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Adrian Harding and Annick Duperray. Editions Mallard, 2004. Republished in Nathaniel Hawthorne: La function éthique de l’oeure—Narrative and the Ethical. Ed. Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding. Paris: Édition Publibook, 2006.) ISBN 978-27-48-31111-2

Articles

 * 2018. “Remarkable International Scholar.” In Ananta Sukla: As We Know Him. Ed. Urishree Bedamatta. Brahmi Academic. 34-35
 * 2016. “Writing on Water—A Dialogue.” Writing on Water Writing on Air: Poetry Installations by Clark Lunberry at the University of North Florida Thomas G. Carpenter Library and Beyond.
 * 2012. “TYSON: The Film, the Image, the Man, the Word, the Force.” With Tim Donovan and Jillian Smith. Studies in Documentary Film 6.1 (May). 3-14.
 * 2009. “At the (Infanticidal) Limits of First-Person Consciousness: Anger, Shame, and the Sacred in Paul Haggis’s Crash.” Soundings 91.1-2 (Spring/Summer). 401-434.
 * 2006. “‘And Her Substance Would Be Mine’: Envy, Hate, and Ontological Evacuation in Josephine Hart’s Sin.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 12-13. 239-258.
 * 2005. “The Fog of War: What Yet Remains,” with Tim Donovan and Jillian Smith. Journal of Postmodern Culture. 16.1 (September). 15,632 words. https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/160
 * 2005. “D-Ciphering Dupin’s Fac-simile Signature: The Infanticidal Implications of a ‘Dessein si Funeste.’” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 6.1 (Spring). 20-36.
 * 2002. “Conceptions and Contraceptions of the Future: Terminator 2, The Matrix, and Alien Resurrection.” Camera Obscura 50. 69-107).
 * 2002. “Laius a tergo, the Symbolic Order, the Production of the Future: Chinatown’s Primal Scene.” Literature and Psychology 48.1-2. 1-31.
 * 2001. “(Not) Begetting the Future: Technological Autochthony, Sexual Reproduction, and the Mythic Structure of The Matrix.” Journal of Popular Culture 35.3 (Winter). 75-203.
 * 2000. “‘Troubles at our Feet’: The Five Riddles of Oedipus.” Soundings 83.1 (Spring). 40-77.
 * 1997. “‘Bad-Ass Dudes’ in Pulp Fiction: Homophobia and the Counterphobic Idealization of Women.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 16.2 (September). 171-192.
 * 1997. “Genesis, Oedipus, and Infanticidal Abjection in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Literature and Psychology 43.3. 41-63.
 * 1993. “Countersigning Aristotle: The Amimetic Challenge of The Scarlet Letter.” ATQ: American Transcendental Quarterly 7.2 (June). 141-158.
 * 1993. “‘Into the light, Leland, into the Light’: Emerson, Oedipus, and the Blindness of Male Desire in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.” Genders 16 (Spring). 17-34.
 * 1987. “Uncanny Narration in Moby-Dick.” American Literature 59.4 (December). 528-547.
 * 1986. “Banning the Infant: Oedipus, Anti-Oedipus, and Reproduction—The Problematics of Autochthonous Desire.” Subjects/Objects 4. 34-50 and 89-91.
 * 1975. “Merlin’s Miscreation and the Repetition Compulsion in Malory’s Morte Darthur.” Literature and Psychology 25.1. 27-33.

Reviews

 * 2022. “Can We Survive Ourselves?” Review of Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (Verso, 2020). NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.