Monthly Archives: June 2013

Jason Read (bio) University of Southern MaineJason.Read@maine.edu Review of John Grant, Dialectics and Contemporary Politics: Critique and Transformation from Hegel through Post-Marxism. New York: Routledge, 2011.  In recent years there have been a slew of publications dealing with the relationship between post-structuralism and Marx. It could be argued that these works follow the lead of […]

Richard Grusin (bio) Center for 21st Century StudiesUniversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukeegrusin@uwm.edu Review of Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge: MIT, 2011.  It came as something of a surprise when I realized that Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts is the first book Brian Massumi has published since […]

  Jian Chen (bio) Ohio State University, Columbus chen.982@osu.edu   Review of Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, eds., Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. Oakland: AK Press, 2011.   “It is not enough to just be urgent and in opposition to state violence but uncritically practice it through exclusion, alienation, sexism, […]

Darren Tofts(bio) Swinburne University of Technologydtofts@groupwise.swin.edu.au  In the 1960s, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters used a psychedelic school bus to take drug culture and heightened consciousness on the road. A Volkswagen bus served a similar purpose for the young Ken Friedman as he travelled across America, promoting an altogether different sensibility. Ken Friedman is […]

Alessia Ricciardi(bio) Northwestern Universitya-ricciardi@northwestern.edu Abstract   Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom customarily has been read as a scandalous artistic exception. In light of the cases of prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib, however, the film can be taken to elaborate a critique of contemporary political conditions that is less than hyperbolic. […]

Erin Trapp (bio)ectrapp@gmail.com Abstract Reviews of poetry written by Guantanamo detainees foreclose the aesthetic potential of the poems, and, as a result, contribute to contemporary human rights discourse’s depoliticization of the subject of human rights. Considering the poems within the field of “post-9/11 literature,” the essay proposes that the poems place the question of how to […]

Birger Vanwesenbeeck(bio)SUNY Fredoniavanweseb@fredonia.edu  Abstract Like Antigone and Hamlet, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is concerned with the vicissitudes of mourning. Oedipa Maas struggles to assume the task of what Pynchon, with Freud, calls the “work” of mourning. Pynchon emphasizes the energy-efficient and non-productive qualities of this work, and takes Freud’s economic model of loss […]

Christian Hite(bio)christianhite@gmail.com Abstract As the story of a man who falls in love with the gait (“two feet”) of a bas-relief, Jensen’s Gradiva offers material for a critique of the (romantic) “couple,” if we read the queer coupling of the word “bas-relief” as both enacting and annihilating the sublimated/sublated “life” of reproductive copula-tion (Zoë).  Might there […]