Browse

Against Sustainability responds to twenty-first-century environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to many of our most familiar environmental solutions. In readings that juxtapose antebellum and contemporary writers such as Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A. S. Byatt, the book reconnects sustainability, recycling, and preservation with nineteenth-century U.S. contexts such as industrial farming, consumerism, slavery, and settler colonial expansion. These readings demonstrate that the paradigms explored are compromised in their attempts to redress environmental degradation because they simultaneously perpetuate the very systems that generate the degradation to begin with. Alongside the chapters that focus on defamiliarization and critique are chapters that reveal that the nineteenth century also gave rise to more unusual and provisional environmentalisms. These chapters offer alternatives to the failed paradigms of recycling and preservation, exploring Henry David Thoreau’s and Emily Dickinson’s joyful, anti-consumerist frugality and Hannah Crafts’s and Harriet Wilson’s radical pet keeping model of living with others. The coda considers zero waste and then contrasts sustainability with functional utopianism, an alternative orienting paradigm that might more reliably guide mainstream U.S. environmental culture toward transformative forms of ecological and social justice. Ultimately, Against Sustainability offers novel readings of familiar literary works that demonstrate how U.S. nineteenth-century literature compels us to rethink our understandings of the past in order to imagine other, more just and environmentally-sound futures.

How do we read after the so-called death of literature? If we are to attend to the proclamations that the representational apparatuses of literature and politics are dead, what aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities remain for us today? This book brings together works of continental philosophy and critical theory (Emmanuel Levinas, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière) and works of art from Argentina (J. L. Borges, Juán José Saer, Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Albertina Carri, the Internacional Errorista) in order to practice what Graff Zivin calls anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art. Rather than “applying” concepts from the former in order to understand or elucidate the latter, the book aim to expose works of philosophy, literary theory, narrative, poetry, film, and performance art/activism to one another. The work of aesthetic or political expression, then, does not appear as an object of study in the conventional sense, but rather as a possible source of philosophical and political thought itself. Ethical and political concepts such as identification and recognition, decision and event, sovereignty and will, are read as constitutively impossible, erroneous, through these acts of interdisciplinary and interdiscursive exposure.

Christian theologians have, for some decades, affirmed that they have no monopoly on encounter with God or ultimate reality; other religions also have access to religious truth and transformation. If so, the time has come for Christians not just to learn about but also from their religious neighbors. Circling the Elephant affirms that the best way to move toward the mystery of divinity is to move toward the mystery of the neighbor. In this book, Thatamanil employs the ancient Indian allegory of the elephant and blindfolded men to argue for the integration of three, often-separated theological projects: theologies of religious diversity, comparative theology, and constructive theology. Circling the Elephant also offers an analysis of why we have fallen short in the past. Interreligious learning has been obstructed by problematic ideas about “religion” and “religions.” Thatamanil also notes troubling resonances between reified notions of “religion” and “race.” He contests these notions and offers a new theory of the religious that makes interreligious learning both possible and desirable. Christians have much to learn from their religious neighbors, even about such central features of Christian theology as Christ and Trinity. This book proposes a new theology of religious diversity, one that opens the door to true interreligious learning.

Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Spanning most of the 20th century, this study investigates poems by Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (two “Objectivist” writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s), Clark Coolidge and Tina Darragh (two “Language Poets” with books from the 1970s and 1980s, respectively), and Harryette Mullen (a post-Black-Arts writer who flourished in the 1990s). By reverse-engineering poems, this study sets the critical record straight on multiple counts. Moreover, reading these poems in tandem with their source texts puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde poems are nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Indeed, beyond the particular arguments and local readings, Dictionary Poetics argues that the new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics maps and articulates the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.

The Fact of Resonance returns to the imperial and colonial contexts in which Anglophone and francophone narrative theory developed, seeking an alternative sonic premise for theorizing narrative form. The exclusion of postcolonial sound and acoustics is foundational not only to modernist studies, but to narrative theory, novel theory, and the strains of film theory they orient. The study is primarily focused on Joseph Conrad and concerns the bearing of his multilingual formation and attunement to the gender and race of sound in colonial encounter. To return to Conrad is to return to the repressed of colonial sound. Bringing new methodologies of sound studies and postcolonial studies to bear upon older models of narrative and close reading, the book argues the novel to be a sound technology. This technology captures not “facts,” but a fact of resonance, which is both a physical sound and a strategy of relation across difference. The book develops a methodology of reading for resonance, while also developing a vocabulary for the acoustic unconscious of texts. These readings focus on the way that imaginary sound and voice circulate within and between texts, from page to psyche, from colonial site to metropole, and across race and gender. The book follows the resonances between Conrad and a series of writers and artists, including Chantal Akerman, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the transatlantic and transpacific are resonance, less a place than an event.

Carlo Diano’s Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, it appears here in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction by Jacques Lezra that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy. Form and Event reads the two classical categories of its title phenomenologically across Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially Homer. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the “eventic form.” On Diano’s reading, eventic forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life.

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. In The Geological Unconcious, Jason Groves traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown, let alone the technologies that could forecast those changes. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, the author traces out a geological unconscious—in other words, unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—where it manifests in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period where this novel geological epoch, though arguably already underway, remains unnamed and otherwise unmarked. These close readings also unearth an entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of cotemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters on which The Geological Unconcious lingers, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination becomes apparent. While The Geological Unconcious does not explicitly set out to imagine alternatives to fossil capitalism, in elaborating a range of such encounters and in registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, it points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence appears and persists in early modern French tragedy, a genre long understood as passionless and refusing all violence. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, can serve as a paradigm for this violence. An alternative to western philosophy’s ethical paradigm of Antigone, the Medean presence offers a model of radically persistent and disruptive outsiderness—for classical theater and its wake in literary theory. In the Wake of Medea explores a range of artistic strategies integrating violence into drama: rhetorical devices like ekphrasis, dramaturgical special effects, and shifts in temporal structures. The full range of this Medean presence appears in literal treatments of Medea (Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or) and in tragedies figuratively invoking a Medean presence (Hercule mourant, Phèdre, Athalie). Of interest to specialists, political theorists, and students of theater, it explores works by well-known dramaturges (Racine, Corneille) alongside a breadth of neoclassical political theater (spectacular machine plays, Neo-Stoic parables, didactic Christian theater). In the Wake recognizes the Medean force within these tragedies, while also exploring why violence remains so integral to literature and arts today.

Eight decades after Ask the Dust first appeared, John Fante’s Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views shows how and why the once-forgotten novel continues to earn its place among the signal works of twentieth-century world literature in our own moment of the twenty-first. Gathered here are twenty responses to the novel from a wide variety of contributors, both American and Italian, including scholars, journalists, filmmakers, creative writers, translators, archive workers, a musicologist, a choreographer, and an American Indian who discovered the book while incarcerated in a California maximum-security prison. In recognizing the novel’s enduring attractions and evolving critical challenges, editors Cooper and Donato have orchestrated the volume’s contents to address both academic audiences and the countless word-of-mouth fans who have made Ask the Dust a perennial international classic. With its array of essays, interviews, talks, memoirs, and correspondence—including an important letter by Fante, newly discovered and published here for the first time—the volume raises Fante studies to a commanding level of significance through its diversity of perspectives on the cornerstone of the author’s oeuvre. Italian American to its core, the picaresque brio of Ask the Dust resonates all the more profoundly today as readers debate, reinterpret, and embrace the abiding truths of Arturo Bandini’s struggle with immigrant dreams, ethnic tensions, romantic love, existential demons, and the better angels of his inherited Catholic faith against the backdrop of that “sad flower in the sand,” the Depression-era city of Los Angeles.

Astrobiology forces us to realize how deeply tethered we are to this pale blue dot in the universe while also opening us to the exciting possibilities of existing in a fecund cosmos. Addressing both of these issues, this work offers a model for doing public theology attuned to astrobioloical humanities. It taps into theology’s capacity to develop societal goods by interpreting religious symbols as expressions of ultimacy that foster powerful moods for meaningfully ordering our ways of being-in and belonging-to the cosmos. Providing a series of specific examples drawn from astrobiology, doctrinal reflection on the imago Dei, and reflections on the Anthropocene, this book claims the Earth is not only a living planet but an artful one. Consequently, it suggests that the imago Dei be reframed in terms of planetarity: to be the imago Dei is to be a planetary system that opens up new possibilities for the flourishing of all creation by fostering technobiogeochemical cycles not subject to runaway, positive feedback. The imago Dei, then, is not something any one of us possesses; it is a symbol for what we live-into together as a species in intra-action with the wider habitable environment. Attentive to how this outlook can be fostered, the conclusion advocates for the development of presence, wonder, and play in the lives of individuals who seek to live as part of an artful planet.

Merleau-Ponty’s Poetics of the World offers detailed studies of the philosopher’s engagements with Proust, Claudel, Claude Simon, André Breton, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and more. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Thus also arise the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. This poetics is worked out across each co-author’s chapters in dialogue with Husserl, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, and Sartre. A new optic proposes the conception of literature as a visual “apparatus” in relation to cinema and screens. Recent transcriptions of Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France The Sensible World and the World of Expression and Research on the Literary Usage of Language, as well as the course of 1953–54, The Problem of Speech, lend timeliness, urgency and energy to this project. Our goal is to specify more precisely the delicate nature and properly philosophical function of literary works in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the literary writer becomes a partner of the phenomenologist. Ultimately, theoretical figures that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.

The book examines the “middling” work performed by writers of the Romantic period such as Lessing, Kleist, P. B. Shelley, and Hölderlin. It traces their attempts to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle, which begin with dislodging terms such as medium, moderation, and mediation from their conventional roles as self-evident, self-effacing tools that conduct from one pole to another or provide a compromise between two extremes. What they offer instead is a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that recognize their centrality to the concept of relation. This produces a profound medial ambivalence that underpins romanticism’s re-writing of conceptual pairs such as origin and destination, speaker and addressee, deficit and surplus, self and other. In this light, we might also ask what it means for us to recognize our mediated relationship to romanticism. To address this question, the readings consider romantic writing in the context of a double juxtaposition: alongside the legacy of romantic middling in the twentieth century but the classical sources about the middle that romanticism draw on. The challenge is to see romanticism as neither ancient nor modern, but as the historical hinge upon which such distinctions turn, the mirror in which our own image is mediated and cast back to us.

The essays in Noir Affect articulate the importance of understanding negative affect and argue that noir is a privileged medium for doing so. Ranging, in its discussion, among a range of media and national contexts, the volume sees noir as a contemporary phenomenon as much as a historical one. Reconceptualized as defined by negative affect, noir becomes a crucial site for thinking about death, decay, anxiety, rage, sadness, guilt, shame, resentment, loss, and the erotic attachment to death. It also becomes a locus of protest and refusal against the boosterish rhetorics of capitalism. The essays in the book argue for the social and political work done by noir affect. Taken together, they make the argument for noir as a vibrant contemporary medium. They also make the argument for negative affect as a crucial political dynamic, one that is underappreciated in many theories of affect. Readers will emerge from the collection with a new understanding of both noir and affect.

Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. This book builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, the book shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. The book investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. It shows that every statement and institution of the universal—such as declarations of human rights—carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, the book suggests, the very conflict of the universal—constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction—also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, the book shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or the passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for these thinkers, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability (except, perhaps, for the rare thunderclap or birdcall). Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music. These theorists postulated that it was music’s physical materiality as sound that vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it argues for renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.

Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor is the first book-length study of O’Connor’s attitude toward race in her fiction and correspondence and is the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of her thoughts on the subject. O’Connor lived and wrote in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights movement. In one of her letters, O’Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the U.S.: “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.” This double-mindedness also manifests itself in O’Connor’s fiction. Drawing on critical whiteness studies, this study analyzes the ways in which O’Connor critiques the unjust racial practices of the South in her stories and other writings yet unconsciously upholds them; explores O’Connor’s ambivalence with regard to contemporary politics; considers the influence of theology and the Catholic Church on O’Connor’s attitudes; examines the complex role played by “Africanist” presence in the construction of white consciousness in O’Connor’s stories; and explores the theme of thwarted communion between the races in her fiction and correspondence. The study concludes that O’Connor’s race-haunted writing serves as the literary incarnation of her uncertainty about the great question of her era and of her urgent need, despite considerable reluctance, to address the fraught relationship between the races.

This book explores the tumultuous history of North American state-making in the middle decades of the nineteenth century from a continental perspective. Today’s political map took its basic shape in the continental crisis of the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation (1867), the end of the U.S. Civil War (1865), the restoration of the Mexican Republic (1867), and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples through the 1870s. This crisis transformed the continent from a patchwork of foreign empires, republics, indigenous polities, and contested no-mans-lands into the nation states of Mexico and the United States and the Dominion of Canada, an expanding, largely self-governing polity within the British Empire. Key to this process was the question of sovereignty, or the power to rule. Battles over sovereignty ran through the struggles waged not only by the nation states that came to dominate the North America, but also those that failed, like the Confederate States of America, and others—like the European empires and indigenous peoples—that came into conflict with the three main states. In light of the global turn in 19th-century historiography, this book examines these political crises as an inter-related struggle to redefine the relationship of North Americans to new governments. This volume brings together distinguished experts on the history of Canada, indigenous Americans, Mexico, and the United States to re-evaluate an era of political transformation that has had profound consequences for the future of the continent.

Contrary to Catholicism, Catholic social teaching, and the commitment to live out the mercy of Jesus Christ, today’s dominant global economic and cultural system, neoliberalism, demands that life be led as a series of sacrifices to the market. This book’s theological critique of neoliberalism begins with recent papal teaching against “economism,” proceeds into a historical and theoretical analysis of neoliberalism’s conception as a discourse in academia and the business community, its rise to global prominence through class warfare, its subtle redefining of human self-understanding via the notion of “human capital,” and its formation of an ethos of mercilessness. Central is treatment of four neoliberal-perpetuated and -exacerbated crises: environmental destruction, slum proliferation, mass incarceration, and mass deportation. This entails plumbing the sacrificial and racist depths of neoliberalism. The book offers an antineoliberal systematic theology founded on Trinitarian mercy, a neighbor anthropology and innkeeper ecclesiology, and a politics of mercy, or a civilizational program grounded in, yet reimagining, the traditional Catholic works of mercy. This coheres with a “playbook” for social transformation that uses the universal destination of goods and abolitionism to direct the corporal works of mercy against the neoliberal utopianism that brought enhanced ecological devastation, slum growth, mass imprisonment, and abuse of migrants. In concert with official Catholic teaching, the Gospel injunction to “be merciful,” and hopeful visions of various people of good will, Send Lazarus urges a robust antineoliberal and antiracist politics, which amounts to a joyous expression of Christic hope for abundant life.

Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein is an exploration of everyday life in which anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture allows her to align her ethnography with stunning anthropological moments in Wittgenstein and Cavell as well as in literary texts from India. Das poses a compelling question—how might we speak of a human form of life when the very idea of the human has been put into question? The response to this question, Das argues, does not lie in some foundational idea of the universal as that of human nature or the human condition but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other within overlapping forms of life. The book shows how reality as ordinary and domestic is impaired not only by catastrophic events but also by the repetitive and corrosive soft knife of everyday violence and deprivation. It advances a view of ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. The book also presents a picture of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable and ethnography is treated as intimately connected to autobiography as a form of reflection emanating from the impersonal regions of the self.

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the writing of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The contributors examine “Balibar and the Philosophy of the Concept” (Warren Montag), “Anthropological” (Bruce Robbins), “Border-concept” (Stathis Gourgouris), “Civil Religion” (Judith Butler), “Concept” (Etienne Balbar), “Contre- / Counter-” (Bernard E. Harcourt), “Conversion” (Monique David-Ménard), “Cosmopolitics” (Emily Apter), “Interior Frontiers” (Ann Laura Stoler), “Materialism” (Patrice Maniglier), “The Political” (Adi Ophir), “Punishment” (Didier Fassin), “Race” (Hanan Elsayed), “Relation” (Jacques Lezra), “Rights” (J.M. Bernstein), and “Solidarity” (Gary Wilder). The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought. Each lexical entry/essay makes a startling, novel intervention in current debates, and as a whole Thinking with Balibar offers a model of collaborative critico-political reading of great importance to global academic culture.