Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a915450
Rahul Govind
Abstract:The following article takes aim at the deeply contested relationship between the secular and the religious in the contemporary: in its conceptual but also genealogical dimensions. Toward this end the essay analyzes Hobbes's Leviathan and Kant's Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason by adopting a bifocaled lens in exposing what is seen as two interrelated forms of universality. One consisted in the (historical and pre-Christian) image of Judaic law and the Jewish people in the self-understanding of what claimed to be a universalizing (moral) Christianity, while the other consisted in a notion of reason that articulates and expresses human morality as a characteristic and index of freedom therein constituting a political society and its laws. The essay argues that the secular-religious dialectic is best understood in terms of this relationship between the image of the Judaic as it operates within Christian and "modern" aspirations toward universality. This dialectic is thereby shown to be essential to thinking and reflecting about the modern emergence of categories like the secular, the national, and the religious in their distinctions: their development as much as their ruin. In such an analysis a critique of the contemporary forms of political-theology—prominently in Schmitt and reiterated in Agamben and Badiou—is also undertaken as conclusion.
{"title":"The Haunting Image of the Frozen Jew (in Christian Self-Understanding), the Self-Determining Universality of Human Reason, and Anticipating the Secular-Nation-State: From Hobbes to Kant and Beyond","authors":"Rahul Govind","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a915450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a915450","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The following article takes aim at the deeply contested relationship between the secular and the religious in the contemporary: in its conceptual but also genealogical dimensions. Toward this end the essay analyzes Hobbes's Leviathan and Kant's Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason by adopting a bifocaled lens in exposing what is seen as two interrelated forms of universality. One consisted in the (historical and pre-Christian) image of Judaic law and the Jewish people in the self-understanding of what claimed to be a universalizing (moral) Christianity, while the other consisted in a notion of reason that articulates and expresses human morality as a characteristic and index of freedom therein constituting a political society and its laws. The essay argues that the secular-religious dialectic is best understood in terms of this relationship between the image of the Judaic as it operates within Christian and \"modern\" aspirations toward universality. This dialectic is thereby shown to be essential to thinking and reflecting about the modern emergence of categories like the secular, the national, and the religious in their distinctions: their development as much as their ruin. In such an analysis a critique of the contemporary forms of political-theology—prominently in Schmitt and reiterated in Agamben and Badiou—is also undertaken as conclusion.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"263 ","pages":"162 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139171094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a915449
Alex Dubilet
Abstract:This essay argues for the political-theological significance of Louis Althusser's theory of interpellation by analyzing the import of the "Christian religious ideology" in his argument. It suggests that the subject as a complex dispositif—of (self-)recognition in relation to a transcendent call, which bestows a proper name, a place in the world, and freedom in obedience—anchors both the Christian and the secular domains. In reconstructing the subject's constitutive elements, this essay argues that interpellation does not merely recruit individuals but itself acts as an operation of individuation. Moreover, the interpellative matrix of the subject works as a sorting mechanism that segregates those who cohere as subjects from those who do not. Turning to the fourteenth-century mystical figure Meister Eckhart, the essay theorizes deinterpellation as a delegitimating force against the interplays of transcendence and subjection wherever they are operative. Rather than opening the self to a transcendent call, Eckhartian deinterpellative becoming nothing affirms an anoriginary freedom detached from the entire matrix uniting interpellative transcendence and the subject.
{"title":"A Political Theology of Interpellation: On Subjection, Individuation, and Becoming Nothing","authors":"Alex Dubilet","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a915449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a915449","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues for the political-theological significance of Louis Althusser's theory of interpellation by analyzing the import of the \"Christian religious ideology\" in his argument. It suggests that the subject as a complex dispositif—of (self-)recognition in relation to a transcendent call, which bestows a proper name, a place in the world, and freedom in obedience—anchors both the Christian and the secular domains. In reconstructing the subject's constitutive elements, this essay argues that interpellation does not merely recruit individuals but itself acts as an operation of individuation. Moreover, the interpellative matrix of the subject works as a sorting mechanism that segregates those who cohere as subjects from those who do not. Turning to the fourteenth-century mystical figure Meister Eckhart, the essay theorizes deinterpellation as a delegitimating force against the interplays of transcendence and subjection wherever they are operative. Rather than opening the self to a transcendent call, Eckhartian deinterpellative becoming nothing affirms an anoriginary freedom detached from the entire matrix uniting interpellative transcendence and the subject.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"161 4","pages":"132 - 161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139172227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a915448
James Dutton
Abstract:This article discusses sport and stupidity to understand modernity's valorization of explication. It reads Robert Musil's modernist novel The Man Without Qualities, which takes numerous excursive opportunities to discuss the role of sport in modern culture and its relationship to "genius," claiming that the grammar of industrial sports has reduced our ability to pay attention to the possibilities within acts we increasingly judge as simply "stupid." To do so, it follows Peter Sloterdijk's critique of modernity's mania for explication at all costs—to the detriment of the vital underside of thinking, or what he calls the implicit. This is explored in numerous examples from Musil's "essayistic" novel, a text that its author showed no willingness to complete—thus leaving its implicit possibilities open, and interminably "without qualities."
{"title":"Implicit Possibility: Stupidity and Sport \"Without Qualities\"","authors":"James Dutton","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a915448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a915448","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses sport and stupidity to understand modernity's valorization of explication. It reads Robert Musil's modernist novel The Man Without Qualities, which takes numerous excursive opportunities to discuss the role of sport in modern culture and its relationship to \"genius,\" claiming that the grammar of industrial sports has reduced our ability to pay attention to the possibilities within acts we increasingly judge as simply \"stupid.\" To do so, it follows Peter Sloterdijk's critique of modernity's mania for explication at all costs—to the detriment of the vital underside of thinking, or what he calls the implicit. This is explored in numerous examples from Musil's \"essayistic\" novel, a text that its author showed no willingness to complete—thus leaving its implicit possibilities open, and interminably \"without qualities.\"","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"136 ","pages":"131 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139172308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a915445
J. A. Godley
Abstract:The ancient problem of the tyrant's seductiveness remains as timely as ever in present-day democracies, despite long established knowledge of his spurious charm. Indeed, such intransigence signals the insufficiency precisely of criticism that focuses solely on knowledge rather than a structural analysis of the paradoxes of enjoyment whereby authoritarian leaders maintain their rapport with the people. Ahead of our time, Melville's 1854 novel The Confidence-Man provides prescient insight into the specific dialectical impasses that fuel the contemporary tyrant's "confidence game." Together with Lacan's revisioning of Freud's myths of sovereignty in Totem and Taboo, this article presents how the contemporary authoritarian masquerade both obfuscates the tragedy of democracy's downfall and remains vulnerable to insurgent truths.
{"title":"The Con and the Primal Horde","authors":"J. A. Godley","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a915445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a915445","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The ancient problem of the tyrant's seductiveness remains as timely as ever in present-day democracies, despite long established knowledge of his spurious charm. Indeed, such intransigence signals the insufficiency precisely of criticism that focuses solely on knowledge rather than a structural analysis of the paradoxes of enjoyment whereby authoritarian leaders maintain their rapport with the people. Ahead of our time, Melville's 1854 novel The Confidence-Man provides prescient insight into the specific dialectical impasses that fuel the contemporary tyrant's \"confidence game.\" Together with Lacan's revisioning of Freud's myths of sovereignty in Totem and Taboo, this article presents how the contemporary authoritarian masquerade both obfuscates the tragedy of democracy's downfall and remains vulnerable to insurgent truths.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"46 10","pages":"1 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139171671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a915446
David Coughlan
Abstract:On March 11, 2004, Madrid was hit by devastating train bombings. The attacks and the resulting protests play an important part in Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), but the novel is not simply about them. Instead, Lerner addresses the relationship between literature and politics. Discussing the influence of John Ashbery's and Allen Grossman's work on Lerner, this article shows how the novel develops an understanding of literature as an immediate mediation between the virtual and the actual. Responding to Lerner's challenge to consider "literature now," and drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on democracy to come, the article then explores how an experience of reading is, for Lerner, an experience of temporality and of exposure to an event to come that requires a decisive, improvised response. Concluding with the novel's recontextualization of the Spanish government's response to the Madrid bombings, the article argues that an experience of literature is an experience of deciding the meaning of what is happening here and now, mirroring an experience of democratic politics.
{"title":"Literature Now and Democracy to Come: Jacques Derrida, Ben Lerner, and Leaving the Atocha Station","authors":"David Coughlan","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a915446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a915446","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:On March 11, 2004, Madrid was hit by devastating train bombings. The attacks and the resulting protests play an important part in Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), but the novel is not simply about them. Instead, Lerner addresses the relationship between literature and politics. Discussing the influence of John Ashbery's and Allen Grossman's work on Lerner, this article shows how the novel develops an understanding of literature as an immediate mediation between the virtual and the actual. Responding to Lerner's challenge to consider \"literature now,\" and drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on democracy to come, the article then explores how an experience of reading is, for Lerner, an experience of temporality and of exposure to an event to come that requires a decisive, improvised response. Concluding with the novel's recontextualization of the Spanish government's response to the Madrid bombings, the article argues that an experience of literature is an experience of deciding the meaning of what is happening here and now, mirroring an experience of democratic politics.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"71 2","pages":"32 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139171471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a915447
Roderick Cooke
Abstract:This article discusses the implications of farmers' insurrections suppressed by state power in Michel Houellebecq's Sérotonine (2019) and Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901). In both cases, the disparity in scale between the farmers' organization and the larger forces set against them (the European Union and the French police, for Houellebecq; the railroad trust and U.S. marshals, for Norris) not only dictates the narrative outcome but also animates a set of questions around globalization, masculinity, the sociological meaning of place, and the relationship between the natural and mechanized worlds. Both novels' conclusions can be read as a surrender to scale, although the two authors' perspectives treat that surrender with ostensibly opposed reactions.
{"title":"Rural Revolt: The Scale Problem in Houellebecq and Norris","authors":"Roderick Cooke","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a915447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a915447","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses the implications of farmers' insurrections suppressed by state power in Michel Houellebecq's Sérotonine (2019) and Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901). In both cases, the disparity in scale between the farmers' organization and the larger forces set against them (the European Union and the French police, for Houellebecq; the railroad trust and U.S. marshals, for Norris) not only dictates the narrative outcome but also animates a set of questions around globalization, masculinity, the sociological meaning of place, and the relationship between the natural and mechanized worlds. Both novels' conclusions can be read as a surrender to scale, although the two authors' perspectives treat that surrender with ostensibly opposed reactions.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"128 ","pages":"66 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139172345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-26DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.a905076
Gust Burns
Abstract:This essay stages a three-way encounter between the 1972 anticolonial film Sambizanga, Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of cinema, and a Fanonian and Afropessimist critique of the human. Directed by the Black Caribbean-French filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020), who recently passed away from complications of COVID-19, Sambizanga dramatizes a moment in the Black Angolan revolutionary struggle against Portuguese colonialism. This essay explores how the images of Sambizanga both exemplify key aspects of the modernist time-image, as formulated in Deleuze's two books on cinema (1986, 1989), and simultaneously demonstrate the time-image concept's inadequacy in describing global fundamental aspects of Black film; Sambizanga materializes a problematization of the cinematic image itself, and demands a new kind of movement. This reading of Maldoror's film facilitates an encounter between Deleuze and Afropessimism, pointing toward an antimmanent orientation. By appropriating a Deleuzian approach to cinema—the analysis of images as presentations of movement and time—for Afropessimist ends, the essay extends Frank Wilderson's (2010) critique of progressivist film narrative to indict the most basic material components of cinema. Utilizing Fanon's auto-theorizing on time and space in Black Skin, White Masks (1952/2008) to denaturalize temporal capacity itself and argue for its fundamental anti-Blackness, the essay locates within Sambizanga two related images of Blackness: the image of incoherence and the image of persistence.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-26DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.a905080
P. Ellis
I once visited the home of two kaleidoscopecollecting sisters, and spent the morning looking through a wide range of scopes: kaleidoscopes, artisanmade and factoryissued; kaleidoscopes, telescopicantique and modern electronic; kaleidoscopes in miniature, small enough to hang on a necklace; and one enormous kaleidoscope that would not fit anywhere indoors. It was a dizzying, kaleidoscopic array of kaleidoscopes, a wild range of fractured and symmetrized images— a psychedelic Wunderkammer. This experience came to mind when reading Meredith Bak’s Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture, which is also something of a Wunderkammer— or better, perhaps, a toy chest. An optical toy chest. In it, beyond the kaleidoscope, we find jigsaw puzzles, rebuses, spinning tops, stereoscopes, thaumatropes, zoetropes, and beyond. Each of these artifacts receives due attention, and along the way, Bak untangles the famously elaborate mockGreek naming conventions of optical toys, as well as the who’swho of the devices’ makers— all those Bradleys and Brewsters, Parises and Plateaus whose names swirl alongside the arcane lexicon of the objects. Playful Visions is topnotch media history, bringing to vivid life those strange objects one may only distantly remember from screenings of Werner Nekes’s Film before Film (1986). Patrick Ellis
我曾经拜访过两个收集万花筒的姐妹的家，花了一个上午的时间浏览了各种各样的范围:万花筒，手工制作的和工厂发行的;万花筒、望远镜、古董和现代电子;迷你万花筒，小到可以挂在项链上;还有一个巨大的万花筒，根本装不下室内的任何地方。这是一个令人眼花缭乱的，万花筒的万花筒阵列，一个破碎和对称的图像的狂野范围——一个迷幻的奇迹。在阅读梅雷迪思·巴克的《好玩的愿景:光学玩具和儿童媒体文化的出现》时，我想到了这一点，这本书也算是一本奇迹般的书——或者更好的说法是，也许是一个玩具箱。光学玩具箱。在书中，除了万花筒，我们还发现了拼图、圆形、旋转陀螺、立体镜、异色镜、西洋镜等等。每一件工艺品都受到了应有的关注，在此过程中，巴克解开了光学玩具著名的仿希腊命名惯例，以及这些设备制造商的名人表——所有那些布拉德利和布鲁斯特，巴黎和高原的名字都在这些物品的神秘词典中旋转。《俏皮的视觉》是一部一流的媒体史，将那些人们可能只在1986年维尔纳·内克斯(Werner Nekes)的《电影之前的电影》(Film before Film)放映中隐约记得的奇怪物体栩栩如生地呈现出来。帕特里克·埃利斯
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Pub Date : 2023-08-26DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.a905078
Konstantinos Pittas
Abstract:Despite the limitations that pertain to the hierarchical nature and regulatory arrangements embodied in and through institutions, this article sets out to envisage museums as agonistic platforms that can contest the neoliberal hegemony and the predominant narratives of the West. To do so, it delves into the political presuppositions and organizing principles of Not An Alternative (a collective that works at the intersection of art, activism, and critical theory) and examines its theory of "institutional liberation" alongside other accounts of institutionality. By inventing a para-institution—the Natural History Museum—to infiltrate the natural history sector and by forging alliances with museum professionals and Indigenous-led campaigns, the article untangles Not An Alternative's understanding of museums as sites to be seized and turned into counterpower infrastructure. In this respect, this article aims to contribute to critical theories that engage with questions of institutionality by reimagining the role of museums in a time of mounting inequalities and climate emergency.
摘要:尽管在机构中体现的等级性质和监管安排存在局限性，但本文将博物馆设想为一个对抗新自由主义霸权和西方主流叙事的竞争平台。为了做到这一点，它深入研究了政治前提和Not An Alternative(一个在艺术、行动主义和批判理论的交叉点工作的集体)的组织原则，并研究了它的“制度解放”理论以及其他关于制度的描述。通过创建一个准机构——自然历史博物馆——来渗透到自然历史领域，并与博物馆专业人士和土著居民领导的运动建立联盟，这篇文章解开了“非替代”对博物馆的理解，即博物馆是被占领的场所，并被转变为对抗权力的基础设施。在这方面，本文旨在通过重新构想博物馆在日益加剧的不平等和气候紧急情况下的作用，为参与制度性问题的批判理论做出贡献。
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