Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a919742
Rachit Anand
Abstract: Does the allegorical frame of an early Coetzee novel like Life & Times of Michael K take the reader on a different course than the struggles against apartheid? Or is it the reader’s ethical responsibility to the text to suspend allegorical demands in favor of the “singularity of the event” of reading? This essay reconsiders these positions on the status of allegory in Coetzee’s fiction. It argues that the issues concerning allegory in this novel are a consequence of a gap between two modalities of time (i.e., “event time” and “historical time”). The function of this temporal gap in the realm of the fictive is further explored to determine how it propels a metonymic force that subverts the symbolic totality sought by the apartheid mind.
{"title":"Burrow Time: Allegorical Thought and the Apartheid Mind","authors":"Rachit Anand","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a919742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a919742","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Does the allegorical frame of an early Coetzee novel like Life & Times of Michael K take the reader on a different course than the struggles against apartheid? Or is it the reader’s ethical responsibility to the text to suspend allegorical demands in favor of the “singularity of the event” of reading? This essay reconsiders these positions on the status of allegory in Coetzee’s fiction. It argues that the issues concerning allegory in this novel are a consequence of a gap between two modalities of time (i.e., “event time” and “historical time”). The function of this temporal gap in the realm of the fictive is further explored to determine how it propels a metonymic force that subverts the symbolic totality sought by the apartheid mind.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140084386","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 : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a919744
Suvij Sudershan
Abstract: While the international reach and political energy of the Third Cinema movement is widely acknowledged, its aesthetic modes and forms have received less attention. This essay hopes to provide such an understanding through a comparative analysis of two Third Cinema films—Mrinal Sen’s Interview (1971) and Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968). Using the category of the picaresque, the essay examines how neocolonial domination informs the postcolonial atmosphere in the two aforementioned works. It reflects on the economic and political aspects of Indian and Senegalese independence and then studies how the two films engage with their respective sovereign states and their colonial pasts within the affective realm of “cruel optimism.” Through an analysis of characterization, cinematography, and narrative arrangement, this essay unearths an array of similarities between these works, indicating a larger formal constellation through which Third Cinema works produced political meaning for their audiences.
{"title":"“What did I Eat?”: Misrecognition and the Neocolonial Picaresque in Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi and Mrinal Sen’s Interview","authors":"Suvij Sudershan","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a919744","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a919744","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: While the international reach and political energy of the Third Cinema movement is widely acknowledged, its aesthetic modes and forms have received less attention. This essay hopes to provide such an understanding through a comparative analysis of two Third Cinema films—Mrinal Sen’s Interview (1971) and Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968). Using the category of the picaresque, the essay examines how neocolonial domination informs the postcolonial atmosphere in the two aforementioned works. It reflects on the economic and political aspects of Indian and Senegalese independence and then studies how the two films engage with their respective sovereign states and their colonial pasts within the affective realm of “cruel optimism.” Through an analysis of characterization, cinematography, and narrative arrangement, this essay unearths an array of similarities between these works, indicating a larger formal constellation through which Third Cinema works produced political meaning for their audiences.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140090658","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 : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a919746
Brad Stiffler
{"title":"The Other Side of the Screen","authors":"Brad Stiffler","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a919746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a919746","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140084230","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 : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a919741
Antonis Balasopoulos
Abstract: With few exceptions, Franz Kafka’s work has been read as deeply dystopian. This essay undertakes an examination of Kafka’s references to the utopian imaginary, from his Diaries to the Zürau Notebooks, and from the story “Fellowship” to Amerika and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, demonstrating that Kafka was both conscious of and interested in the rhetoric associated with utopian (or “intentional”) communities and in the parameters of utopia as a genre of writing. Rather than either advocating or rejecting utopia/nism, Kafka uses it as a means through which to develop, within his writing, a way of investigating the social and ideological problem of community—particularly acute for him as a multiply estranged European Jew—and the aesthetic problems of impossibility and failure.
{"title":"Utopia, Modernism, and Failure: On Franz Kafka’s Impossibilities","authors":"Antonis Balasopoulos","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a919741","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a919741","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: With few exceptions, Franz Kafka’s work has been read as deeply dystopian. This essay undertakes an examination of Kafka’s references to the utopian imaginary, from his Diaries to the Zürau Notebooks, and from the story “Fellowship” to Amerika and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, demonstrating that Kafka was both conscious of and interested in the rhetoric associated with utopian (or “intentional”) communities and in the parameters of utopia as a genre of writing. Rather than either advocating or rejecting utopia/nism, Kafka uses it as a means through which to develop, within his writing, a way of investigating the social and ideological problem of community—particularly acute for him as a multiply estranged European Jew—and the aesthetic problems of impossibility and failure.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140084186","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 : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a919743
Lakshmi Padmanabhan
Abstract: Recent critical thinking on anthropogenic climate change has mourned cinema’s ability to capture the slow violence of large-scale environmental degradation and foresee a future of environmental disaster that is unchecked because it remains invisible to aesthetic representation. This essay argues that the rise of slow cinema aesthetics, particularly the affective mode of anxiety that it cultivates through the chronic violence of the long take, is one aesthetic approach within contemporary cinema to mediate slow violence. This argument is developed through a close reading of Tsai Ming-liang’s film, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), paying particular attention to the representations of ambient toxicity, the exhausting forms of reproductive labor on display, and the queer forms of intimacy that are cultivated throughout.
{"title":"The Weather in Tsai: Slow Cinema and Slow Violence","authors":"Lakshmi Padmanabhan","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a919743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a919743","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Recent critical thinking on anthropogenic climate change has mourned cinema’s ability to capture the slow violence of large-scale environmental degradation and foresee a future of environmental disaster that is unchecked because it remains invisible to aesthetic representation. This essay argues that the rise of slow cinema aesthetics, particularly the affective mode of anxiety that it cultivates through the chronic violence of the long take, is one aesthetic approach within contemporary cinema to mediate slow violence. This argument is developed through a close reading of Tsai Ming-liang’s film, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), paying particular attention to the representations of ambient toxicity, the exhausting forms of reproductive labor on display, and the queer forms of intimacy that are cultivated throughout.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140089303","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 : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a919740
Filippo Menozzi
Abstract: This essay discusses the concept of nonchronological time through the philosophies of Paolo Virno and Ernst Bloch, mostly focusing on Virno’s Déjà vu and the End of History , originally published as Il Ricordo del Presente in 1999. In this work, Virno formulates the thesis that capitalism is the first social form that historicizes the metahistorical and nonchronological invariant that defines human life. An important element in Virno’s argument is what he presents as a more radical reinterpretation of Ernst Bloch’s idea of the “contemporaneity of the non-contemporary.” Virno translates Bloch’s notion of ungleichzeitigkeit as coexistence of potentiality and act, or labor-power and commodity. In many respects, Bloch and Virno could be aligned as thinkers of a nonchronological time of possibility in the tradition of historical materialism. However, Virno’s engagement with Bloch seems to be missing central aspects of Bloch’s original formula. Unlike Virno, Bloch’s philosophy does not limit the nonchronological to temporal anteriority or heterogeneity; on the contrary, Bloch’s theory of time uncovers the nonlinear dialectical contradictions between unfinished pasts and open-ended futures.
摘要:本文通过保罗-维尔诺(Paolo Virno)和恩斯特-布洛赫(Ernst Bloch)的哲学思想讨论非时间概念,主要侧重于维尔诺的《似曾相识与历史的终结》(Déjà vu and the End of History),该书原名为《Il Ricordo del Presente》,出版于 1999 年。在这部著作中,维尔诺提出了这样一个论点:资本主义是第一个将定义人类生活的元历史和非时间不变性历史化的社会形态。维尔诺论证中的一个重要元素,是他对恩斯特-布洛赫的 "非当代性的当代性 "思想进行了更为激进的重新诠释。维尔诺将布洛赫的 "非当代性"(ungleichzeitigkeit)概念翻译为 "潜能与行为"(potentiality and act)或 "劳动力与商品"(labor-power and commodity)的共存。在许多方面,布洛赫和维尔诺可以说是历史唯物主义传统中的非时间可能性时间的思想家。然而,维尔诺与布洛赫的接触似乎缺少了布洛赫原始公式的核心内容。与维尔诺不同,布洛赫的哲学并没有将非时间性局限于时间的先行性或异质性;相反,布洛赫的时间理论揭示了未完成的过去与开放的未来之间的非线性辩证矛盾。
{"title":"Variations on Time: Reading Paolo Virno Reading Ernst Bloch","authors":"Filippo Menozzi","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a919740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a919740","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay discusses the concept of nonchronological time through the philosophies of Paolo Virno and Ernst Bloch, mostly focusing on Virno’s Déjà vu and the End of History , originally published as Il Ricordo del Presente in 1999. In this work, Virno formulates the thesis that capitalism is the first social form that historicizes the metahistorical and nonchronological invariant that defines human life. An important element in Virno’s argument is what he presents as a more radical reinterpretation of Ernst Bloch’s idea of the “contemporaneity of the non-contemporary.” Virno translates Bloch’s notion of ungleichzeitigkeit as coexistence of potentiality and act, or labor-power and commodity. In many respects, Bloch and Virno could be aligned as thinkers of a nonchronological time of possibility in the tradition of historical materialism. However, Virno’s engagement with Bloch seems to be missing central aspects of Bloch’s original formula. Unlike Virno, Bloch’s philosophy does not limit the nonchronological to temporal anteriority or heterogeneity; on the contrary, Bloch’s theory of time uncovers the nonlinear dialectical contradictions between unfinished pasts and open-ended futures.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140083503","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.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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}