Monthly Archives: September 2013

Michael Malouf (bio)Department of English, George Mason University mmalouf@gmu.edu Review of: Charles Stewart, ed. Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory. Walnut Creek: Left Coast, 2007.   Ever since James Clifford declared in 1988 that “we are all Caribbeans now living in our urban archipelagoes” there has been a rise in the theoretical cachet of creolization as a […]

Joshua Kates (bio)Department of English, Indiana Universityjkates@indiana.edu Review of: Badiou, Alain. Polemics. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso, 2006.   Reading Alain Badiou’s Polemics, one might initially have the sensation of having wandered into a conversation not meant for oneself. Polemics consists of an English translation of a series of three slender French books, Circonstances I-III, […]

Joseph Keith (bio)English Department, Binghamton University, SUNYjkeith@binghamton.edu Review of: Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.   What went wrong? How to explain the dismal state of today’s political landscape in the U.S.–with neoconservatism and free-market triumphalism in such dominance and the left in a […]

Eleanor Kaufman (bio)Department of Comparative Literature and Department of French and Francophone Studies,University of California, Los Angeles Abstract Although Alain Badiou’s early work is deeply critical of French theories of libidinal economy that sought to synthesize Marx and Freud in the wake of May 1968, this essay seeks to summarize the central tenets of libidinal economy […]

Laurence A. Rickels (bio)Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies, University of California, Santa Barbararickels@gss.ucsb.edu Abstract Philip K. Dick’s Valis trilogy staggers as seemingly separable phases the elements he metabolized all together in such works as Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. From the intersection crowded with science fiction, schizophrenia, and mysticism in Valis […]

Brett Levinson (bio)Department of Comparative Literature, State University of New York at Binghamtonblevins@binghamton.edu Abstract This essay considers a line of thought about the possibility of political action in psychoanalytic theory. In the mid-1930s George Bataille asked why popular political movements during this period yielded, ultimately, fascism rather than communism. He responds by suggesting that for the […]

Alan Bass (bio)Philosophy Department, New School for Social Research and Training Analyst and Faculty, Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, New York Freudian SocietyBassAJ@aol.com Abstract Freudian theory historicizes sexuality, makes it temporal in a new way. Is there a relation between the rethinking of time in Heidegger and the temporality of sexuality? Jean Laplanche asks a […]

Jan Mieszkowski (bio)German Department, Reed Collegemieszkow@reed.edu   Few twentieth-century discourses have shaped the humanities and social sciences like psychoanalysis. The work of Sigmund Freud and his inheritors has been a driving force behind countless efforts to rethink the most fundamental questions of subjectivity, history, and politics. This enduring influence is readily evident in contemporary gender […]

Suzanne Diamond (bio)Youngstown State Universitysdiamond@ysu.edu Review of: Clare Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip. Oxford: Berg, 2006.   Gossip and conspiracy discourse have long been epistemologically suspect, and recent critical treatments tend either to celebrate or to excoriate these social phenomena. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip heralds a new […]

Christopher C. Robinson (bio)Clarkson Universityrobinscc@clarkson.edu Review of: Nana Last, Wittgenstein’s House: Language, Space, & Architecture. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.   Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two of the core texts of philosophy’s linguistic turn in the twentieth century: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus, revered as the Bible of Logical Positivism, was written by a […]

Graham Hammill (bio)SUNY at Buffaloghammill@buffalo.edu Review of: Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2008.   We all know that happiness is a form of stupidity. Once The Declaration of Independence promises the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right, it’s difficult not to […]

Susan A. Crane (bio)University of Arizonascrane@email.arizona.edu Review of: Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.   Paris, 2001: an exhibition that commemorates the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of the Holocaust stirs up a vehement public debate. Georges Didi-Huberman, a […]

Darren Wershler (bio)Wilfrid Laurier University Review of: Kenneth Goldsmith, The Weather. Los Angeles; Make Now, 2005, Goldsmith, Traffic. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2007, and Goldsmith, Sports. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2008.   I can’t help it: trilogies are nerd Kryptonite. My childhood library was chock-full of science fiction and heroic fantasy books organized into epic […]

Stuart Moulthrop (bio)University of Baltimoresamoulthrop@ubmail.ubalt.edu   This essay reveals key plot details of the graphic novel Watchmen and the film based upon it.   On March 6, 2009, Warner Brothers released a motion picture based on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel, Watchmen, directed by Zack Snyder and written for the screen by David […]

David Greven (bio)Connecticut Collegedgrev@conncoll.edu  Abstract     As the most important and sustained cyborg narrative in Hollywood film, the Terminator films, particularly the first two, continue to demand a considerable amount of critical scrutiny. When the highly charged allegorical power of the figure of the cyborg is added to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s star persona, now evolved […]

Jillian Smith (bio)University of North Floridajlsmith@unf.edu Abstract Driver’s Education, like all accident-prevention discourses, attempts to govern that which it cannot represent. Representing the accident reduces the multiple, complex force of its coming forth. The images of accidents shown to students in driver’s education can never be the accident that awaits them, and the accident that awaits […]

Kalindi Vora (bio)University of CaliforniaSan Diegokavora@ucsd.edu Abstract “Others’ Organs” explores the particular limits on the mobility of rural agriculturalist South Indians, middle class Sri Lankan women, and young Indian and Pakistani men, whose needs for jobs become entwined with the commodification of “life.” I argue that the material constraints on these workers, as well as the […]

Steve Garlick (bio)University of Victoriasgarlick@uvic.ca Abstract It is generally acknowledged that molecular biology has been enamored with discourses of information theory and cybernetics from its earliest days. Equally common, in critical theory, is the belief that biological science has lost purchase on important dimensions of embodied life as a result. This essay suggests, however, that when […]