CONTENTS
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Jussi Parikka, Insects, Sex, and Biodigitality in Lynn
Hershman Leeson's Teknolust
Stephen Voyce, The Xenotext Experiment: An Interview with
Christian Bok
Marc Botha, How To Lose Your Voice Well
Annette Schlichter, "I Can't Get Sexual Genders Straight":
Kathy Acker's Writing of Bodies and Pleasures
Steven Helmling, How To Read Adorno on How To Read Hegel
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Reviews
Bernard Duyfhuizen, "The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness":
Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. A review of Thomas
Pynchon, Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Tim Christensen, Bill Cosby and American Racial
Fetishism. A review of Michael Eric Dyson, Is Bill
Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?
New York: Basic Civitas, 2005.
Aimee L. Pozorski, Mourning Time. A review of R. Clifton
Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility
in Elegiac Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.
Robert T. Tally, Jr., The Agony of the Political. A
review of Chantal Mouffe, On the Political. London:
Routledge, 2005.
David Bockoven, After Reading After Poststructuralism. A
review of Colin Davis, After Poststructuralism: Reading,
Stories and Theory. New York: Routledge, 2004.
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Notices (HTML Version Only)
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Notes on Contributors
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Abstracts
Marc Botha, How To Lose Your Voice Well
* Abstract: This essay identifies the voice, and its ability
to reach and pull together even as it divides, as the pivot upon
which a radical reconsideration of communication and the
inevitability of miscommunication can turn. The concept of
"intervocalic communion" is developed to explore these issues
in three scenes: a choir in which each member sings a part
unrelated to any of the others, a chattering crowd at the opening
of an art exhibition, and the imagined multilingual din a few
moments before the opening of a General Assembly meeting of the
United Nations. Is communication possible in these scenarios
that are essentially hostile to it? The essay argues that the
(re-)introduction of silence into intervocalic communion--a
special case of losing one's voice--reinvigorates the
possibility of communication. --mb
Steven Helmling, How To Read Adorno on How To Read Hegel
* Abstract: This article reads Adorno's 1962 essay
"Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel" as an implicit program for
Adorno's own writing practice. Throughout his oeuvre, Adorno is
consistent in the demand that philosophical writing must enact
in its "form" the arguments and negations that philosophy
usually thought of as its "content." Commentators rightly take
"The Essay as Form" as Adorno's most insistent manifesto on
behalf of this very modernist idealization of writing. (Among
this article's aims is to evoke the specifically modernist
context of Adorno's thinking about writing, from Hegel to
Mallarme and beyond.) But "The Essay as Form" prescribes for
philosophy, so to speak, generically, expounding the creative
and expressive tension of "form" with "content" in general,
without investment in any particular philosophical positions.
"Skoteinos," by contrast, though not so explicitly staged as a
program for philosophical writing, is vastly more fraught than
"The Essay as Form" in mobilizing Adorno's prescriptions about
writing as a critique of his most potent philosophical
precursor. "Skoteinos" intimates Adorno's own ambitions, and
anxieties, as a practitioner of (philosophical) theory and/or
theorist of philosophical (writing) practice. "Skoteinos" stages
Hegel's philosophical failures as a function of Hegel's failures
as writer, and more broadly of Hegel's failure to bring the
implications of his dialectic for language to realization in the
"form" or textuality of his own writing--as if Hegel the
"immanentist" should have known better than anyone that there
could be no "end of art." Moreover, Adorno's account of Hegel's
failure implicitly declares Adorno's own philosophical
aspiration, renewing Hegel's project by correcting Hegel's
shortcomings. If Adorno's grandiose claims for the aesthetic
are usually assessed according to philosophical criteria,
this article attempts the reverse, to do unto Adorno as
"Skoteinos" does unto Hegel: to put Adorno's theory to the
proof of his writing practice. --sh
Jussi Parikka, Insects, Sex, and Biodigitality in Lynn
Hershman Leeson's Teknolust
* Abstract: The article analyzes the Lynn Hershman Leeson's
film Teknolust (2002) as an alternative take on the visual
creation of biodigitality. Arguing that Teknolust can be read
as a probe into the infiltration of biodigital creatures in
contemporary networks of communication, the article suggests
that in the film the figures of sexuality, agency and
technology are understood as non-human affects. Here, the idea
of "insectoid" modes of agency underlines the tension between
the three Self-Reproducing Automata (SRA) of the film: between
human DNA and technological networks, and between heterosexual
mating rites and viral biodigital forms of reproduction. --jp
Annette Schlichter, "I Can't Get Sexual Genders Straight":
Kathy Acker's Writing of Bodies and Pleasures
* Abstract: The essay explores Kathy Acker's reconfiguration
of heterosexual practice and identity in her "novel" Don Quixote.
The essay shows how the production of dissident heterosexualities
forms a radical critique of sexuality by situating Don Quixote in
the controversy over what Michel Foucault has called "bodies and
pleasures," the counterdiscursive concept he distinguishes from
the reigning system of sex-desire. Through its claim to represent
and legitimize excessive, perverse female heterosexual desires,
Don Quixote reimagines socio-sexual relations through "bodies and
pleasures" without giving up the critical force that the notion of
sex-desire has offered feminist critics of the construction of the
subject. Acker queers the conditions of representation by
deploying the oppositional potential of "bodies and pleasures." --as
Stephen Voyce, The Xenotext Experiment: An Interview with
Christian Bok
* Abstract: Christian Bok is the author of two collections of
poetry: Crystallography (Coach House, 1994) and Eunoia (Coach House,
2001), which earned the Griffin Prize for Poetry in 2002. He is
also a sound poet and conceptual artist; Bok has performed to
audiences internationally, and his art has been showcased at the
Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and with the traveling text art
exhibition Metalogos. This interview considers the wider scope of
his artistic practice and his current project, The Xenotext
Experiment, which explores the relationship between poetry and
biotechnology. Bok hopes to encode a poetic text into the genetic
sequence of a living organism. --sv
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