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The personal is not political, even if politics marks it and, in many cases, determines it. Infrapolitics seeks to understand conditions of existence that are not reducible to political life and that exceed any definition of world bound to political determinations. It seeks to mobilize an exteriority without which politics could only be business or administration, that is, oppression. It demands a change in seeing and an everyday practice that subtracts from political totalization in the name of a new production of desire, of a new emancipation, and of a conception of experience that can breach the general captivation of life. Infrapolitics thinks of itself as both a general critique of the political apparatus and as an imperative horizon for existential self-understanding. It understands the intense politicity of its gesture while at the same time claiming an enabling distance from politics. It is a form of thought aiming to provide content for a form of life. It offers a new theoretical practice for concrete existence. This book provides a genealogy of the notion and places it within contemporary philosophical reflection, examining its deployment in the wake of postphenomenology and deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the principle of anarchy, and an egalitarian symbolization of social life.

What is a “Catholic” novel? How does it relate to the intersection between literary theory and theology? What forms of dialogue can religious and secular critics enjoy? And what role can Graham Greene play in the discussion? This book analyses the fiction of Greene in a radically new manner by considering in depth its form and content, which rests on the oppositions between secularism and religion, Sampson challenges these distinctions by arguing that Greene has a dramatic contribution to add to their methodological premises, and, especially, the imaginative and interpretative statuses of literature and Catholicism. Inclusive of Greene’s contribution are different critical and religious impulses that are present throughout the investigative tenors that his work invokes. Chapters on Greene’s four “Catholic” novels and two of his “post-Catholic” novels are complemented by a fresh and vital insight into the critical importance of his non-fiction. The study paints an image of an inviting yet beguilingly complex literary figure, and within new and significant perspectives on the growing importance of the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Greene is shown to be central to groups who have until now been largely neglected in literary debate.

Can poetry, even a deeply philosophical poetry, articulate something about love that philosophy itself cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven “metaphysical” poems, this book shows how figures ranging from John Donne to Emily Dickinson use poetic form to turn philosophy to new ends, transforming its concern to know truth about love into concern to create virtual experiences of love. These poems create strange loves made in, rather than through, the forms—the devices, structures and forces particular to verse—where they appear. Tracing how poems think, this book argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close—from one perspective, even too close—attention to and thinking with the text. In The Form of Love, Kuzner reads as closely as possible in order to consider as seriously as possible how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields: how poems do not complete philosophy or compete with it, and how poetry and philosophy instead can enter into a relation that is itself like love.

An analysis that focuses on the metapsychological dimension of queer theorizations will demonstrate why, in spite of how bold and emancipatory key queer formulations might initially seem, the field maintains an uninterrogated reliance on erotophobic psychological conventions that ultimately reproduces an erotophobic relationship to sexuality. Homo Psyche introduces metapsychology as a new dimension of analysis that zeroes in on the underlying psychological assumptions that determine contemporary critical thought. Such an intervention deepens current debates about the future of queer studies by demonstrating how the field’s systematic neglect of metapsychology as a necessary and independent realm of ideology ultimately enforces the complicity of queer studies with psychological conventions that are fundamentally erotophobic and therefore inimical to queer theory’s radical and ethical project. Homo Psyche therefore introduces a break with the current configuration of traditional psychoanalysis as the presumptive and undisputed foundation for radical psycho-sexual theorizations. In order to elaborate a critical alternative, the French theoretician Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) will be introduced. In order to rigorously articulate and defend the centrality of sexuality to psychic life, Laplanche insisted on “new foundations for psychoanalysis” that radically departed from existing Freudian and Lacanian models of the mind. This study conducts a purposive survey of six major theoretical concepts, through the lens of six eminent individual critics who represent exemplary, influential, and authoritative developments of them: Eve Sedgwick on “hermeneutics,” Leo Bersani on “sex,” Jane Gallop on “violation,” Lee Edelman on “radicalism,” Judith Butler on “gender,” and Lauren Berlant on “relationality.”

Five hundred years before “Jabberwocky” and Tender Buttons, writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice has come increasingly into view in recent years, an impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the period’s theologically motivated commitment to the kernel of meaning as over against the shell of the mere letter. This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, it inquires into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized possibilities inherent in the traditional accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern hermeneutics of obscurity in order to provide materials for an archeology of the category of the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows how these medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems were engineered in such a way as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the encounter with language itself.

Why did Saint Augustine ask God to “circumcise [his] lips”? Why does Sir Gawain cut off the Green Knight’s head on the Feast of the Circumcision? Is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath actually—as an early glossator figures her—a foreskin? And why did Ezra Pound claim that he had incubated The Waste Land inside of his uncut member? In this book, A. W. Strouse excavates a poetics of the foreskin, uncovering how Patristic theologies of circumcision came to structure medieval European literary aesthetics. Following the writings of Saint Paul, “circumcision” and “uncircumcision” become key terms for theorizing language—especially the dichotomies between the mere text and its extended exegesis, between brevity and longwindedness, between wisdom and folly. Form and Foreskin looks to three works: a peculiar story by Saint Augustine about a boy with the long foreskin; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. By examining literary scenes of cutting and stretching, Strouse exposes how Patristic treatments of circumcision queerly govern medieval poetics.

The beginning is both internal and external to the text it initiates, and that non-coincidence points to the text’s vexed relation with its outside. Hence the non-trivial self-reflexivity of any textual beginning, which must bear witness to the self-grounding quality of the literary work—its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority. In a different but related way does the fact that they must render our lives and our desires opaque to us; what Freud called “latency” marks not only sexuality but human thought with a self-division shaped by asynchronicity. From Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces to George Eliot’s epigraphs, from Ovid’s play with meter to Charles Dickens’s thematizing of the ex nihilo emergence of character, from Wallace Stevens’s abstract consideration of poetic origins to James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty’s descriptions of queer childhood, writers repeatedly confront the problem of inception. Most explicitly for James, for whom revision, a striving to keep the work perpetually at the border of its emergence, was a fundamentally ethical practice, attention to inception is a commitment to human freedom; a similar commitment is legible in all the writers examined here. To experience this vibrancy, the sense that the work might have been, might still yet be, otherwise, it suffices, James reminds us, to reread it. Inceptions traces an ethics of reading, that follows from perceiving, in the ostensibly finished forms of lives and texts, the potentiality inherent in their having started forth.

This book compares Romantic England and Republican China as asynchronous moments of incipient literary modernity in different lifeworlds. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. The book examines select literary forms—the literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel—as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms-of-life. These forms function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages, activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, the texts analyzed explore by literary means the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds and ongoing traditions. Authors studied include Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang. This book contributes to the fields of comparative literature, British Romanticism, and modern Chinese literature.

Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant forms in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question—who is a Muslim—is predominant in eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief amongst them, but takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the modern Urdu literary formation, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate on the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship, first in colonial India and subsequently in contemporary Pakistan.

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.