Jacqueline Rose ,”Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)

“The humans are dead.” Whether or not you recognize the epigram from Flight of the Conchords (and if not, there are worse ways to spend a few minutes than by looking here, and I recommend sticking around for the “binary solo”), Dominic Pettman‘s Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) will likely change the way you think about humanity, animals, machines, and the relationships among them. Pettman uses a series of fascinating case studies, from television programs to films to Sufi fables to pop songs, to explore the notion of Agamben’s “anthropological machines” and the human being as a “technospecies without qualities” in a modern mediascape that includes Thomas Edison’s film Electrocuting an Elephant, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and the interplanetary soundscape created by NASA (among many, many others). We recently gathered over Skype to talk about some of the major thematic and argumentative threads snaking through this book and Pettman’s recent exploration of totems in Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (Zero Books, 2013). Both books take on the varied ways that love, technology, identity (both human and not), and economies have been transformed in a world that includes pacifist Orcs, voices without bodies, ecologies without nature, reptile-doctors, and pixelated lovers. Enjoy! During our conversation, Pettman mentions a film about the zigzag totem that can be found here. Cabinet Magazine, which also comes up in the course of our conversation, can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

31 Touko 20131h 15min

In his very recent work, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past(University of Chicago Press, 2013), Amir Eshel presents us with a very interesting examination of what he refers to as “futurity” or literature’s ability to provide us with a way to access the past, rethink it, and move forward. Eshel’s work here can best be understood as part of the larger effort in literary studies to move beyond the tired and exceedingly fruitless lens of the hermeneutics of suspicion and the despairing chasm of postmodernity. As foci, Eshel examines postwar German literature and Hebrew literature particularly focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Overall, the portion of Futurity that continues to linger with me is Eshel’s beautiful ruminations on W.G. Sebald’s masterpiece, Austerlitz. Eshel’s reflections on Austerlitz encouraged me to pick up that novel once more and for this alone I highly encourage anyone interested in postwar German literature, Hebrew literature, and or the future and meaning of literary studies to give Eshel’s work a read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

22 Tammi 201356min

In his book, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Nicholas de Villiers takes up an examination of the work of the three titular authors as a way of understanding their queerness and more specifically, how each man subverted the “in-and-out of the closet” paradigm. De Villiers devotes ample time to each man, however I found his thoughts on Foucault and Barthes of particular importance as both have come to be so deeply associated with postmodernism, poststructuralism, and queer theory. It is safe to say that Foucault is in large part responsible for the theoretical and philosophical foundations of what we know of today as queer theory and queer studies. This fact makes Foucault’s own relationship with his “out” sexuality all the more fascinating and de Villiers does a great service to Foucault, showing that Foucault himself subverted the “in-and-out of the closet” paradigm and society’s need to ferret out and make known our sexualities. While many scholars, academics, and cultural critics have criticized Foucault for his “silence,” de Villiers’s work suggests that Foucault’s life was a practice in complicating and disrupting the immense societal desire to see homosexuality expressed in one sanctioned way. De Villiers work here is deep, insightful, and refreshing in its attempt to offer an alternative to “suspicious reading.” I do hope you enjoy our conversation. Photo Credit: Lauren M. Jones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

11 Tammi 201357min

In When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2012), Avner Baz sets out to make a case for the reconsideration of Ordinary Language Philosophy, or OLP, in mainstream academic philosophy. I personally found Baz’s work in it interesting due to the fact that my familiarity with OLP comes solely from a literary perspective and both Baz, as a trained philosopher, and his argumentation present an interesting glimpse into the deep resistance towards OLP that can be found in mainstream philosophy. In fact, after reading When Words Are Called For, and even more so, after speaking with Dr. Baz, it became apparent just how differently philosophers and literary academics view, value, and understand OLP and what it has to offer the critics and the curious. For those readers who have either a deep affinity for OLP or who come at it from a literary, non-analytical philosophical perspective much of When Words Are Called For will seem spot on but ultimately unnecessary in the best sense of that word in that Baz spends a great deal of his time making a case for the legitimacy of a philosophical perspective that many who are familiar with it from a literary perspective will simply find a given. This is truly the result of a difference in disciplinary perspective more than anything else. Where When Words Are Called For does shine is in the epilogue, “Ordinary Language Philosophy, Kant, and the Roots of Antinomial Thinking,” where Baz offers some fascinating insights into the connections between Kant and OLP. Admittedly, When Words Are Called For is best for the skeptical philosopher, but it also serves a great purpose in illustrating the extreme differences in how two humanist disciplines can approach and come to understand a way of thinking about the world and conceptualizing the language that unites it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

31 Loka 201252min

In Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature (Routledge, 2007), Ulrich Plass makes the case for the importance and relevance of Adorno’s often forgotten and derided attempts at literary criticism. Plass specifically draws our attention to five subjects, Eichendorff, Rudolf Borchardt, Stefan George, Heinrich Heine, and Goethe, and Adorno’s response to their work as a way to make sense of the purpose, motivation, and significance of Adorno’s oeuvre. As Plass reminds us, and indeed shows us again and again, Adorno’s literary criticism can be quirky and enigmatic and yet strikingly impenetrable at its best, and utterly baffling and unreadable at its most trying. For Plass however, the determination and rigor required to make sense of Adorno’s literary criticism is worth the reward as he ultimately concludes that its true value lies not solely in its role as such, but rather as a companion and a primer of sorts to his larger philosophical work. The central focus of Language and History is not Adorno’s response to or criticism of any one writer or piece in particular though, rather it is the essay itself. The essay here more specifically represents what Plass comes to suggest is the medium by which Adorno is able to “act out” his understanding of language and aesthetics rather than ever being able to fully and cohesively conceptualize it in any one phrase or essay of literary criticism-to “say it”. In this sense what Plass leaves us with most is an invaluable tool with which to approach a unified understanding of Adorno in which his literary criticism and philosophy are not isolated singularities but rather complementary works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

25 Syys 201259min

In his recent book, The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (University of Chicago Press, 2011), J. Hillis Miller sets outs to address Theodor Adorno’s famous proclamation that to write poetry after Auschwitz is impossible and barbaric. One should make clear from the outset that Miller’s central project in this regard is not to make some grand claim about the value or worth of literature in the face of dehumanization and atrocity. The value of literature for him and for us is a given. There is nothing to argue. Rather, Miller is most concerned with addressing the question of whether or not literature can truly bear witness to the Shoah. While this question has indeed been a central concern of literary scholars, philosophers, and artists since Celan and Adorno, Miller’s method of approaching this topic by way of the theoretical concept of “community,” and more specifically, “literary communities,” is rather intriguing. Here, Miller invokes the work of Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy in particular. As a way of illustrating his theoretical claims, Miller looks extensively at Kafka’s The Castle, The Man Who Disappeared, and The Trial In fact, Miller spends almost two-thirds of The Conflagration of Community examining these and several other Kafka works in order to reveal the extent to which literature can “imagine” the bureaucracies and social infrastructures of the Shoah. Miller’s love and deep admiration for Kafka shines through here and he does an amazing job of penetrating Kafka’s writing and making sense of it in light of his theoretical perspective. Beside the work of Kafka, Miller also looks extensively at novels that explicitly invoke the Shoah. Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus make this list and Miller does each justice. In addition to the central issue of literature and the Shoah, there also exist several parallel concerns throughout The Conflagration of Community. Among these are American slavery and the serious injustices and human rights violations committed during the Bush administration. In a refreshing way, Miller’s work in The Conflagration of Community ends up being about much more than the Shoah and in successfully completing the Benjaminian constellation he tells us is his intention to construct in the preface, Miller creates something that is both profound and that persists beyond the page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

23 Elo 20121h 33min

As the last of what Wendy Steiner refers to as “a loose trilogy” with her earlier works, The Scandal of Pleasure (1995) and Venus in Exile (2001), The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (University of Chicago, 2010) sets out to establish the centrality of “the model” in art to our understanding of subjectivity and freedom and the ethical imperative that she suggests lies within it. For Steiner, “the model,” historically conceptualized and understood as female and objectified as such, assumes the level of ontological importance and acts as a symbolic structure that not only lays bare the hierarchies and mechanics of power, but possess the unique ability to reimagine and “introduce new hierarchies into the world” (20). “The model” along with politics and power in Steiner’s estimation are closely linked and in fact bound together. The intriguing and theoretical tension between the seeming contradiction that what on the level of the symbol can be read as object can also be accessed in order to influence the real is one that is thrilling to see the author trace and work out. To this point specifically, Steiner does an incredible job. Her theoretical argument invokes the work of Kant, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler to varying degrees. Neatly divided into three parts, The Real Real Thing moves from a theoretical exploration of “the model” to several fascinating studies of artists and art works that have employed the model as Steiner envisions it.Bringing “the model” from the realm of the theoretical to that of the real, Steiner closes the book by returning to her notion of the ethical imperative inherent to it. She makes a strong and impassioned case for modern art and what she sees as its “democratic” and “progressive” nature in its ability to not just call attention to itself as art, as an end in itself, but to invite the spectator into a symbiotic union that creates. It is within this union that traditionally rigid aesthetic notions of beauty and perfection can be overridden and redefined anew. I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art and I encourage anyone interested in aesthetics, the future of art, and the future of the arts especially to read this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

16 Heinä 201256min

Pipes matter. That’s right: pipes. Anyone who has spent time in Russia knows that the hulkish cylinders that snake throughout its cities are the lifeblood of urban space, linking apartment block after apartment block into a centralized network. But pipes are more than tentacles that form the Russian social state. As Stephen Collier argues in his Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton UP, 2011), their physical organization act as structural impediments to neoliberal reform. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism, Collier demonstrates that the intransigence of the mundane innards of the former Soviet social state–pipes, wires, budgets, apartment blocks, bureaucratic routines and social norms–require us to rethink our standard narratives of neoliberalism as everywhere and behind everything. Rethinking the actual implementation of neoliberalism in Russia’s turbulent 1990s takes Collier to the provinces, specifically the mono-industrial towns of Belaya Kalitva and Rodniki. There, Soviet postwar urban planning networked industrial development, population, and social welfare with the factory as the central node in what Collier calls “enterprise-centric social modernity.” The factory served as the khoziain, from which radiated the city’s utilities, schools, health care, and cultural centers, planned according to measured norms of allocation and output. But what happened when the Soviet Union collapsed? How did reformers decouple Russia’s integrated social welfare from its economic production? Surprisingly, Collier finds that despite neoliberalism’s tendencies toward privatization and monetarization, the relics of Soviet modernity forced reformers to preserve basic aspects of the Russian social state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

20 Kesä 20121h 17min