Lit Z – serie

Published posthumously, Ending and Unending Agony is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's only book entirely devoted to the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). The place of Blanchot in Lacoue-Labarthe's thought was both discreet and profound, involving difficult, agonizing questions about the status of literature, with vast political and ethical stakes.Together with Plato, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, Blanchot represents a decisive crossroads for Lacoue-Labarthe's central concerns. In this book, they converge on the question of literature, and in particular of literature as the question of myth—in this instance, the myth of the writer born of the autobiographical experience of death.However, the issues at stake in this encounter are not merely autobiographical; they entail a relentless struggle with processes of figuration and mythicization inherited from the age-old concept of mimesis that permeates Western literature and culture. As this volume demonstrates, the originality of Blanchot's thought lies in its problematic but obstinate deconstruction of precisely such processes.In addition to offering unique, challenging readings of Blanchot's writings, setting them among those of Montaigne, Rousseau, Freud, Winnicott, Artaud, Bataille, Lacan, Malraux, Leclaire, Derrida, and others, this book offers fresh insights into two crucial twentieth-century thinkers and a new perspective on contemporary debates in European thought, criticism, and aesthetics.

Published posthumously, Ending and Unending Agony is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's only book entirely devoted to the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). The place of Blanchot in Lacoue-Labarthe's thought was both discreet and profound, involving difficult, agonizing questions about the status of literature, with vast political and ethical stakes.Together with Plato, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, Blanchot represents a decisive crossroads for Lacoue-Labarthe's central concerns. In this book, they converge on the question of literature, and in particular of literature as the question of myth—in this instance, the myth of the writer born of the autobiographical experience of death.However, the issues at stake in this encounter are not merely autobiographical; they entail a relentless struggle with processes of figuration and mythicization inherited from the age-old concept of mimesis that permeates Western literature and culture. As this volume demonstrates, the originality of Blanchot's thought lies in its problematic but obstinate deconstruction of precisely such processes.In addition to offering unique, challenging readings of Blanchot's writings, setting them among those of Montaigne, Rousseau, Freud, Winnicott, Artaud, Bataille, Lacan, Malraux, Leclaire, Derrida, and others, this book offers fresh insights into two crucial twentieth-century thinkers and a new perspective on contemporary debates in European thought, criticism, and aesthetics.

Reading with John Clare argues that at the heart of contemporary biopolitical thinking is an insistent repression of poetry. By returning to the moment at which biopolitics is said to emerge simultaneously with romanticism, this project renews our understanding of the operations of contemporary politics and its relation to aesthetics across two centuries.Guyer focuses on a single, exemplary case: the poetry and autobiographical writing of the British poet John Clare (1793–1864). Reading Clare in combination with contemporary theories of biopolitics, Guyer reinterprets romanticism's political legacies, specifically the belief that romanticism is a direct precursor to the violent nationalisms and redemptive environmentalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Guyer offers an alternative account of many of romanticism's foundational concepts, like home, genius, creativity, and organicism. She shows that contemporary critical theories of biopolitics, despite repeatedly dismissing the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of power as a culpable ideology, emerge within the same rhetorical tradition as the romanticism they denounce. The book thus compels a rethinking of the biopolitical critique of poetry and an attendant reconsideration of romanticism and its concepts.

Reading with John Clare argues that at the heart of contemporary biopolitical thinking is an insistent repression of poetry. By returning to the moment at which biopolitics is said to emerge simultaneously with romanticism, this project renews our understanding of the operations of contemporary politics and its relation to aesthetics across two centuries.Guyer focuses on a single, exemplary case: the poetry and autobiographical writing of the British poet John Clare (1793–1864). Reading Clare in combination with contemporary theories of biopolitics, Guyer reinterprets romanticism's political legacies, specifically the belief that romanticism is a direct precursor to the violent nationalisms and redemptive environmentalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Guyer offers an alternative account of many of romanticism's foundational concepts, like home, genius, creativity, and organicism. She shows that contemporary critical theories of biopolitics, despite repeatedly dismissing the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of power as a culpable ideology, emerge within the same rhetorical tradition as the romanticism they denounce. The book thus compels a rethinking of the biopolitical critique of poetry and an attendant reconsideration of romanticism and its concepts.

Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. Whereas Romanticism is well known for its relation to the past, Emily Rohrbach situates Romantic epistemological uncertainties in relation to historiographical debates that opened up a radically unpredictable and fast- approaching future. As the rise of periodization made the project of defining the "spirit of the age" increasingly urgent, the changing sense of futurity rendered the historical dimensions of the present deeply elusive. While historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Rohrbach draws attention to moments when these writers felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age. Illuminating the poetic strategies Keats, Austen, Byron, and Hazlitt used to convey that sense of mystery, Rohrbach describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority—of uncertainty concerning what will have been. Romantic writers, she shows, do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make imaginable a new way of thinking the historical present when faced with the temporalities of modernity.

Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. Whereas Romanticism is well known for its relation to the past, Emily Rohrbach situates Romantic epistemological uncertainties in relation to historiographical debates that opened up a radically unpredictable and fast- approaching future. As the rise of periodization made the project of defining the "spirit of the age" increasingly urgent, the changing sense of futurity rendered the historical dimensions of the present deeply elusive. While historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Rohrbach draws attention to moments when these writers felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age. Illuminating the poetic strategies Keats, Austen, Byron, and Hazlitt used to convey that sense of mystery, Rohrbach describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority—of uncertainty concerning what will have been. Romantic writers, she shows, do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make imaginable a new way of thinking the historical present when faced with the temporalities of modernity.

This book examines the affinity between "theory" and "deconstruction" that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the "Yale Critics": Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.With this semi-fictional collective, theory became a media event, first in the academy and then in the wider print media, in and through its phantasmatic link with deconstruction and with "Yale." The important role played by aesthetic humanism in American pedagogical discourse provides a context for understanding theory as an aesthetic scandal, and an examination of the ways in which de Man's work challenges aesthetic pieties helps us understand why, by the 1980s, he above all had come to personify "theory."Combining a broad account of the "Yale Critics" phenomenon with a series of careful reexaminations of the event of theory, Redfield traces the threat posed by language's unreliability and inhumanity in chapters on lyric, on Hartman's representation of the Wordsworthian imagination, on Bloom's early theory of influence in the 1970s together with his later media reinvention as the genius of the Western Canon, and on John Guillory's influential attempt to interpret de Manian theory as a symptom of literature's increasing marginality. A final chapter examines Mark Tansey's paintings Derrida Queries de Man and Constructing the Grand Canyon, paintings that offer subtle, complex reflections on the peculiar event of theory-as-deconstruction in America.

This book examines the affinity between "theory" and "deconstruction" that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the "Yale Critics": Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.With this semi-fictional collective, theory became a media event, first in the academy and then in the wider print media, in and through its phantasmatic link with deconstruction and with "Yale." The important role played by aesthetic humanism in American pedagogical discourse provides a context for understanding theory as an aesthetic scandal, and an examination of the ways in which de Man's work challenges aesthetic pieties helps us understand why, by the 1980s, he above all had come to personify "theory."Combining a broad account of the "Yale Critics" phenomenon with a series of careful reexaminations of the event of theory, Redfield traces the threat posed by language's unreliability and inhumanity in chapters on lyric, on Hartman's representation of the Wordsworthian imagination, on Bloom's early theory of influence in the 1970s together with his later media reinvention as the genius of the Western Canon, and on John Guillory's influential attempt to interpret de Manian theory as a symptom of literature's increasing marginality. A final chapter examines Mark Tansey's paintings Derrida Queries de Man and Constructing the Grand Canyon, paintings that offer subtle, complex reflections on the peculiar event of theory-as-deconstruction in America.

Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism takes its title and point of departure from Walter Benjamin's concept of the historical constellation, which puts both "contemporary" and "romanticism" in play as period designations and critical paradigms. Featuring fascinating and diverse contributions by an international roster of distinguished scholars working in and out of romanticism—from deconstruction to new historicism, from queer theory to postcolonial studies, from visual culture to biopolitics—this volume makes good on a central tenet of Benjamin's conception of history: These critics "grasp the constellation" into which our "own era has formed with a definite earlier one." Each of these essays approaches romanticism as a decisive and unexpired thought experiment that makes demands on and poses questions for our own time: What is the unlived of a contemporary romanticism? What has romanticism's singular untimeliness bequeathed to futurity? What is romanticism's contemporary "redemption value" for painting and politics, philosophy and film?

Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism takes its title and point of departure from Walter Benjamin's concept of the historical constellation, which puts both "contemporary" and "romanticism" in play as period designations and critical paradigms. Featuring fascinating and diverse contributions by an international roster of distinguished scholars working in and out of romanticism—from deconstruction to new historicism, from queer theory to postcolonial studies, from visual culture to biopolitics—this volume makes good on a central tenet of Benjamin's conception of history: These critics "grasp the constellation" into which our "own era has formed with a definite earlier one." Each of these essays approaches romanticism as a decisive and unexpired thought experiment that makes demands on and poses questions for our own time: What is the unlived of a contemporary romanticism? What has romanticism's singular untimeliness bequeathed to futurity? What is romanticism's contemporary "redemption value" for painting and politics, philosophy and film?

The scenes of Babel and Pentecost, the original confusion of tongues and their redemption through translation, haunt German Romanticism and Idealism. This book begins by retracing the ways in which the task of translation, so crucial to Romantic writing, is repeatedly tied to prophecy, not in the sense of telling future events, but in the sense of speaking in the place of another—most often unbeknownst to the speaker herself. In prophetic speech, the confusion of tongues repeats, each time anew, as language takes place unpredictably in more than one voice and more than one tongue at once. Mendicino argues that the relation between translation and prophecy drawn by German Romantic writers fundamentally changes the way we must approach this so-called "Age of Translation." Whereas major studies of the period have taken as their point of departure the opposition of the familiar and the foreign, Mendicino suggests that Romantic writing provokes the questions: how could one read a language that is not one? And what would such a polyvocal, polyglot language, have to say about philology—both for the Romantics, whose translation projects are most intimately related to their philological preoccupations, and for us? In Prophecies of Language, these questions are pursued through readings of major texts by G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Hölderlin. These readings show how, when one questions the presupposition of works composed by individual authors in one tongue, these texts disclose more than a monoglot reading yields, namely the "plus" of their linguistic plurality. From such a surplus, each chapter goes on to advocate for a philology that, in and through an inclination toward language, takes neither its unity nor its structure for granted but allows itself to be most profoundly affected, addressed—and afflicted—by it.

The scenes of Babel and Pentecost, the original confusion of tongues and their redemption through translation, haunt German Romanticism and Idealism. This book begins by retracing the ways in which the task of translation, so crucial to Romantic writing, is repeatedly tied to prophecy, not in the sense of telling future events, but in the sense of speaking in the place of another—most often unbeknownst to the speaker herself. In prophetic speech, the confusion of tongues repeats, each time anew, as language takes place unpredictably in more than one voice and more than one tongue at once. Mendicino argues that the relation between translation and prophecy drawn by German Romantic writers fundamentally changes the way we must approach this so-called "Age of Translation." Whereas major studies of the period have taken as their point of departure the opposition of the familiar and the foreign, Mendicino suggests that Romantic writing provokes the questions: how could one read a language that is not one? And what would such a polyvocal, polyglot language, have to say about philology—both for the Romantics, whose translation projects are most intimately related to their philological preoccupations, and for us? In Prophecies of Language, these questions are pursued through readings of major texts by G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Hölderlin. These readings show how, when one questions the presupposition of works composed by individual authors in one tongue, these texts disclose more than a monoglot reading yields, namely the "plus" of their linguistic plurality. From such a surplus, each chapter goes on to advocate for a philology that, in and through an inclination toward language, takes neither its unity nor its structure for granted but allows itself to be most profoundly affected, addressed—and afflicted—by it.

In this book, Jaime Rodríguez Matos proposes the "formless" as a point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time. Thinking through both literary and political writings around the Cuban Revolution, Rodríguez Matos explores the link between abstract symbolic procedures and various political experiments that have sought to give form to a principle of sovereignty based on the category of representation. In doing so, he proposes the formless as the limit of modern and contemporary reflections on the meaning of politics while exploring the philosophical consequences of a formless concept of temporality for the critique of metaphysics.Rodríguez Matos takes the writing and thought of José Lezama Lima as the guiding thread in exploring the possibility of a politicity in which time is imagined beyond the disciplining functions it has had throughout the metaphysical tradition—a time of the absence of time, in which the absence of time no longer means eternity.

In this book, Jaime Rodríguez Matos proposes the "formless" as a point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time. Thinking through both literary and political writings around the Cuban Revolution, Rodríguez Matos explores the link between abstract symbolic procedures and various political experiments that have sought to give form to a principle of sovereignty based on the category of representation. In doing so, he proposes the formless as the limit of modern and contemporary reflections on the meaning of politics while exploring the philosophical consequences of a formless concept of temporality for the critique of metaphysics.Rodríguez Matos takes the writing and thought of José Lezama Lima as the guiding thread in exploring the possibility of a politicity in which time is imagined beyond the disciplining functions it has had throughout the metaphysical tradition—a time of the absence of time, in which the absence of time no longer means eternity.

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being—often violently—challenged, erased, or reinforced, we must rethink the concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept? Through an original and imaginative reading of Kant, Geoffrey Bennington casts doubt upon the conceptual coherence of borders.The frontier is the very element of Kant's thought yet the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Bennington brings out the frontier's complex, abyssal, fractal structure that leaves a residue of violence in every frontier and complicates Kant's most rational arguments in the direction of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace.Neither a critique of Kant nor a return to Kant, this book proposes a new reflection on philosophical reading, for which thinking the frontier is both essential and a recurrent, fruitful, interruption.

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being—often violently—challenged, erased, or reinforced, we must rethink the concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept? Through an original and imaginative reading of Kant, Geoffrey Bennington casts doubt upon the conceptual coherence of borders.The frontier is the very element of Kant's thought yet the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Bennington brings out the frontier's complex, abyssal, fractal structure that leaves a residue of violence in every frontier and complicates Kant's most rational arguments in the direction of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace.Neither a critique of Kant nor a return to Kant, this book proposes a new reflection on philosophical reading, for which thinking the frontier is both essential and a recurrent, fruitful, interruption.

This book offers a manifesto for a radical existentialism aiming to regenerate the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Neyrat calls this outside "atopia": not utopia, a dreamt place out of the world where everything would be perfect, but atopia, the internal outside that is at the core of every being. Atopia is neither an object that an "object-oriented ontology" would be able to formalize, nor the matter that "new materialisms" could identify. Atopia is what constitutes the existence of any object or subject, its singularity or more precisely its "eccentricity." Etymologically, to exist means "to be outside" and the book argues that every entity is outside, thrown in the world, wandering without any ontological anchor. In this regard, a radicalized existentialism does not privilege human beings (as Sartre and Heidegger did), but considers existence as a universal condition that concerns every being.It is important to offer a radical existentialism because the current denial of the outside is politically, and aesthetically, damaging. Only an atopian philosophy—a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy—can care for our fear of the outside. For therapeutic element, a radical existentialism favors everything that challenges the compact immanence in which we are trapped, losing capacity to imagine political alternatives. To sustain these alternatives, the book identifies the atopia as a condition of the possibility to break immanence and analyze these breaks in human and animal subjectivity, language, politics and metaphysics.

This book offers a manifesto for a radical existentialism aiming to regenerate the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Neyrat calls this outside "atopia": not utopia, a dreamt place out of the world where everything would be perfect, but atopia, the internal outside that is at the core of every being. Atopia is neither an object that an "object-oriented ontology" would be able to formalize, nor the matter that "new materialisms" could identify. Atopia is what constitutes the existence of any object or subject, its singularity or more precisely its "eccentricity." Etymologically, to exist means "to be outside" and the book argues that every entity is outside, thrown in the world, wandering without any ontological anchor. In this regard, a radicalized existentialism does not privilege human beings (as Sartre and Heidegger did), but considers existence as a universal condition that concerns every being.It is important to offer a radical existentialism because the current denial of the outside is politically, and aesthetically, damaging. Only an atopian philosophy—a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy—can care for our fear of the outside. For therapeutic element, a radical existentialism favors everything that challenges the compact immanence in which we are trapped, losing capacity to imagine political alternatives. To sustain these alternatives, the book identifies the atopia as a condition of the possibility to break immanence and analyze these breaks in human and animal subjectivity, language, politics and metaphysics.

On the Nature of Marx's Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the inextricable interrelation between the material world and our language for it. Lezra traces to Marx's earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues to haunt Marx's inheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that we think materiality in non-self-evident ways, as dynamic, aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading."Lezra," writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, "transfers all of the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of translation." Lezra's expansive understanding of translation covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to the contradictory lexicons—of fetishism and of chrematistics—that Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach that's framed Marx's work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx's thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an object is, of what counts as matter, value, sovereignty, mediation, and even number. In On the Nature of Marx's Things a materialism "of the encounter," as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory, post-Schmittian divisible sovereignty, object-oriented-ontologies and the critique of correlationism, and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The inheritors of the problems with which Marx grapples range from Spinoza's marranismo, through Melville's Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions of Schiller and Verdi, through Adorno's exilic antihumanism against Said's cosmopolitan humanism, through today's new materialisms.Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capital's capture of difference away from the story of capital's production of subjectivity. It affords concepts and procedures for dismantling the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands: concrete, this-wordly things like commodities, but also such "objects" as debt traps, austerity programs, the marketization of risk; ideologies; the pedagogical, professional, legal, even familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.

On the Nature of Marx's Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the inextricable interrelation between the material world and our language for it. Lezra traces to Marx's earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues to haunt Marx's inheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that we think materiality in non-self-evident ways, as dynamic, aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading."Lezra," writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, "transfers all of the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of translation." Lezra's expansive understanding of translation covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to the contradictory lexicons—of fetishism and of chrematistics—that Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach that's framed Marx's work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx's thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an object is, of what counts as matter, value, sovereignty, mediation, and even number. In On the Nature of Marx's Things a materialism "of the encounter," as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory, post-Schmittian divisible sovereignty, object-oriented-ontologies and the critique of correlationism, and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The inheritors of the problems with which Marx grapples range from Spinoza's marranismo, through Melville's Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions of Schiller and Verdi, through Adorno's exilic antihumanism against Said's cosmopolitan humanism, through today's new materialisms.Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capital's capture of difference away from the story of capital's production of subjectivity. It affords concepts and procedures for dismantling the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands: concrete, this-wordly things like commodities, but also such "objects" as debt traps, austerity programs, the marketization of risk; ideologies; the pedagogical, professional, legal, even familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.

The arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of conceiving the "end of things," one that treats lastness as neither privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of romanticism—and romantic studies—within the key of the last, Khalip refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability. Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.

This book examines the practice of portraits as a way in to grasping the paradoxes of subjectivity. To Nancy, the portrait is suspended between likeness and strangeness, identity and distance, representation and presentation, exactitude and forcefulness. It can identify an individual, but it can also express the dynamics by means of which its subject advances and withdraws.The book consists of two extended essays written a decade apart but in close conversation, in which Nancy considers the range of aspirations articulated by the portrait. Heavily illustrated, it includes a newly written preface bringing the two essays together and a substantial Introduction by Jeffrey Librett, which places Nancy's work within the range of thinking of aesthetics and the subject, from religion, to aesthetics, to psychoanalysis.Though undergirded by a powerful grasp of the philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition that has rendered our sense of the subject so problematic, Nancy's book is at heart a delightful, unpretentious reading of three dozen portraits, from ancient drinking mugs to recent experimental or parodic pieces in which the artistic representation of a sitter is made from their blood, germ cultures, or DNA.The contemporary world of ubiquitous photos, Nancy argues, in no way makes the portrait a thing of the past. On the contrary, the forms of appearing that mark the portrait continue to challenge how we see the bodies and representations that dominate our world.

This book examines the practice of portraits as a way in to grasping the paradoxes of subjectivity. To Nancy, the portrait is suspended between likeness and strangeness, identity and distance, representation and presentation, exactitude and forcefulness. It can identify an individual, but it can also express the dynamics by means of which its subject advances and withdraws.The book consists of two extended essays written a decade apart but in close conversation, in which Nancy considers the range of aspirations articulated by the portrait. Heavily illustrated, it includes a newly written preface bringing the two essays together and a substantial Introduction by Jeffrey Librett, which places Nancy's work within the range of thinking of aesthetics and the subject, from religion, to aesthetics, to psychoanalysis.Though undergirded by a powerful grasp of the philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition that has rendered our sense of the subject so problematic, Nancy's book is at heart a delightful, unpretentious reading of three dozen portraits, from ancient drinking mugs to recent experimental or parodic pieces in which the artistic representation of a sitter is made from their blood, germ cultures, or DNA.The contemporary world of ubiquitous photos, Nancy argues, in no way makes the portrait a thing of the past. On the contrary, the forms of appearing that mark the portrait continue to challenge how we see the bodies and representations that dominate our world.

Any reader engaging the work of Keats, Shelley, or Coleridge must confront the role biography has played in the canonization of each. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge's case, of promise wasted in indolence. One confronts reminiscences of contemporaries who describe subjects singularly unsuited to this world, as well as still stranger materials—death masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heart—initially preserved by circles and then circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus.Especially when it centers on the early deaths of Keats and Shelley, biographical interest tends to be dismissed as a largely Victorian and sentimental phenomenon that we should by now have put behind us. And yet a line of verse by these poets can still trigger associations with biographical detail in ways that spark pathos or produce intimations of prolepsis or fatality, even for readers suspicious of such effects. Biographical fascination—the untoward and involuntary clinging of attention to the biographical subject—is thus "posthumous" in Keats's evocative sense of the term, its life equivocally sustained beyond its period.Lives of the Dead Poets takes seriously the biographical fascination that has dogged the prematurely arrested figures of three romantic poets. Arising in tandem with a sense of the threatened end of poetry's allotted period, biographical fascination personalizes the precariousness of poetry, binding poetry, the poet-function, and readers to an irrecuperable singularity. Reading romantic poets together with the modernity of Benjamin and Baudelaire, Swann shows how poets' afterlives offer an opening for poetry's survival, from its first nineteenth-century death sentences into our present.

Any reader engaging the work of Keats, Shelley, or Coleridge must confront the role biography has played in the canonization of each. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge's case, of promise wasted in indolence. One confronts reminiscences of contemporaries who describe subjects singularly unsuited to this world, as well as still stranger materials—death masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heart—initially preserved by circles and then circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus.Especially when it centers on the early deaths of Keats and Shelley, biographical interest tends to be dismissed as a largely Victorian and sentimental phenomenon that we should by now have put behind us. And yet a line of verse by these poets can still trigger associations with biographical detail in ways that spark pathos or produce intimations of prolepsis or fatality, even for readers suspicious of such effects. Biographical fascination—the untoward and involuntary clinging of attention to the biographical subject—is thus "posthumous" in Keats's evocative sense of the term, its life equivocally sustained beyond its period.Lives of the Dead Poets takes seriously the biographical fascination that has dogged the prematurely arrested figures of three romantic poets. Arising in tandem with a sense of the threatened end of poetry's allotted period, biographical fascination personalizes the precariousness of poetry, binding poetry, the poet-function, and readers to an irrecuperable singularity. Reading romantic poets together with the modernity of Benjamin and Baudelaire, Swann shows how poets' afterlives offer an opening for poetry's survival, from its first nineteenth-century death sentences into our present.

Winner: AAIS First Book PrizeOld Schools marks out a modernist countertradition. The book makes sense of an apparent anachronism in twentieth-century literature and cinema: a fascination with outmoded, paradigmatically pre-modern educational forms that persists long after they are displaced in progressive pedagogical theories.Advocates of progressive education turned against Latin in particular. The dead language—taught through time-tested means including memorization, recitation, copying out, and other forms of repetition and recall—needed to be updated or eliminated, reformers argued, so that students could breathe free and become modern, achieving a break with convention and constraint. Yet McGlazer's remarkable book reminds us that progressive education was championed not only by political progressives, but also by Fascists in Italy, where it was an object of Gramsci's critique. Building on Gramsci's pages on the Latin class, McGlazer shows how figures in various cultural vanguards, from Victorian Britain to 1970s Brazil, returned to and reimagined the old school.Strikingly, the works that McGlazer considers valorize this school's outmoded techniques even at their most cumbersome and conventional. Like the Latin class to which they return, these works produce constraints that feel limiting but that, by virtue of that limitation, invite valuable resistance. As they turn grammar drills into verse and repetitious lectures into voiceovers, they find unlikely resources for critique in the very practices that progressive reformers sought to clear away.Registering the past's persistence even while they respond to the mounting pressures of modernization, writers and filmmakers from Pater to Joyce to Pasolini retain what might look like retrograde attachments—to tradition, transmission, scholastic rites, and repetitive forms. But the counter-progressive pedagogies that they devise repeat the past to increasingly radical effect. Old Schools teaches us that this kind of repetition can enable the change that it might seem to impede.

Winner: AAIS First Book PrizeOld Schools marks out a modernist countertradition. The book makes sense of an apparent anachronism in twentieth-century literature and cinema: a fascination with outmoded, paradigmatically pre-modern educational forms that persists long after they are displaced in progressive pedagogical theories.Advocates of progressive education turned against Latin in particular. The dead language—taught through time-tested means including memorization, recitation, copying out, and other forms of repetition and recall—needed to be updated or eliminated, reformers argued, so that students could breathe free and become modern, achieving a break with convention and constraint. Yet McGlazer's remarkable book reminds us that progressive education was championed not only by political progressives, but also by Fascists in Italy, where it was an object of Gramsci's critique. Building on Gramsci's pages on the Latin class, McGlazer shows how figures in various cultural vanguards, from Victorian Britain to 1970s Brazil, returned to and reimagined the old school.Strikingly, the works that McGlazer considers valorize this school's outmoded techniques even at their most cumbersome and conventional. Like the Latin class to which they return, these works produce constraints that feel limiting but that, by virtue of that limitation, invite valuable resistance. As they turn grammar drills into verse and repetitious lectures into voiceovers, they find unlikely resources for critique in the very practices that progressive reformers sought to clear away.Registering the past's persistence even while they respond to the mounting pressures of modernization, writers and filmmakers from Pater to Joyce to Pasolini retain what might look like retrograde attachments—to tradition, transmission, scholastic rites, and repetitive forms. But the counter-progressive pedagogies that they devise repeat the past to increasingly radical effect. Old Schools teaches us that this kind of repetition can enable the change that it might seem to impede.

How do we read after the so-called death of literature? If we are to attend to the proclamations that the representational apparatuses of literature and politics are dead, what aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities remain for us today? Our critical moment, Graff Zivin argues, demands anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art.Rather than applying concepts from philosophy in order to understand or elucidate cultural works, the book exposes works of philosophy, literary theory, narrative, poetry, film, and performance art and activism to one another. Working specifically with art, film, and literature from Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges, Juán José Saer, Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Albertina Carri, the Internacional Errorista), Graff Zivin allows such thinkers as Levinas, Derrida, Badiou, and Rancière to be inflected by Latin American cultural production. Through these acts of interdiscursive and interdisciplinary (or indisciplinary) exposure, such ethical and political concepts as identification and recognition, decision and event, sovereignty and will, are read as constitutively impossible, erroneous. Rather than weakening either ethics or politics, however, the anarchaeological reading these works stage and demand opens up and radicalizes the possibility of justice.

How do we read after the so-called death of literature? If we are to attend to the proclamations that the representational apparatuses of literature and politics are dead, what aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities remain for us today? Our critical moment, Graff Zivin argues, demands anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art.Rather than applying concepts from philosophy in order to understand or elucidate cultural works, the book exposes works of philosophy, literary theory, narrative, poetry, film, and performance art and activism to one another. Working specifically with art, film, and literature from Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges, Juán José Saer, Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Albertina Carri, the Internacional Errorista), Graff Zivin allows such thinkers as Levinas, Derrida, Badiou, and Rancière to be inflected by Latin American cultural production. Through these acts of interdiscursive and interdisciplinary (or indisciplinary) exposure, such ethical and political concepts as identification and recognition, decision and event, sovereignty and will, are read as constitutively impossible, erroneous. Rather than weakening either ethics or politics, however, the anarchaeological reading these works stage and demand opens up and radicalizes the possibility of justice.