Works

John Mowitt, Spins
 
Emily Apter, Tecnics of the Subject: The Avatar-
Drive

Amit Ray and Evan Selinger, Jagannath's
Saligram: On Bruno Latour and Literary Critique
After Postcoloniality 

Michael Marder, Terror of the Ethical: On
Levinas's Il y a

Sven-Erik Rose, Remembering Dora Bruder: Patrick
Modiano's Surrealist Encounter with the
Postmemorial Archive


Reviews
 
David Banash, A Natural History of Consumption:
The Shopping Carts of Julian Montague.  A review of
Julian Montague, The StrayShopping Carts of Eastern
North America: A Guide to Field Identification.
New York: Abrams Image, 2006.

Kenneth Goldsmith, The Noise of Art.
A review of Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music,
Between Categories. New York: Rizzoli, 2007.

Stephanie Hart, Ways of See(th)ing: A
Record of Visual Punk Practice. A review of Mark
Sladen and Ariella Yedgar, eds. Panic Attack! Art
in the Punk Years. London: Merrell, 2007.

Mikko Tuhkanen, The Wager of Death: Richard
Wright With Hegel and Lacan. A review of
JanMohamedAbdul R., The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard
Wright's Archaeology of Death. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.

Pieter Vermeulen, The Future of Possibility.
A review of Anne-Lise Francois. Open Secrets: The
Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2008.

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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

John Mowitt, Spins

Abstract: This essay explores some of the points of
contact between philosophical reflection and dance.
Paying close attention to way the figure of dance is
put to work in texts by Norbert Elias, Karl Marx,
Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Man,
Plato, and Jacques Derrida, the essay teases out a
connection between the philosophical gesture of
exemplification, the non sequitur whereby the
abstract is propped up by or otherwise made to lean
upon the concrete, and the move to an "outside" of
the text understood either simply as reference, or
more ambitiously as revolution. When, as is the case
with the texts attended to here, dance is the example
exemplified, a swirling field of reflexive
associations arise around it, associations that
invite us to recognize in dance a stance to be taken,
perhaps even a set of steps to be followed, as
activists and scholars alike contemplate what will
be required to get from one world to another.--jm

Emily Apter, Technics of the Subject: The Avatar-Drive

Abstract:  This essay considers the digital avatar
not simply as a name for a virtual double of the
player of videogames, but as bound to or manifesting
psychological drive, a kind of homunculus of the
drive. Drawing on a wide range of theories that have
informed technical constructions of the subject, it
applies in particular an important moment in Lacan's
description of the drive to the concept of the gaming
"avatar." It argues that the avatar is a variant of
precursor representations of the drive specific to
the technical imaginary of videogames.--ea

Amit Ray and Evan Selinger, Jagannath's Saligram: On
Bruno Latour and Literary Critique After Postcoloniality

Abstract:  Bruno Latour has turned to Indian vernacular
fiction to illustrate the limits of ideology critique.
In examining the method of literary analysis that
underlies his appropriation of postcolonial history and
culture, we appeal to Edward Said's notion of "traveling
theory" in order to discuss critically the aesthetic as
well as political stakes of using the technology of the
modern novel for the allegorical purposes that Latour
has in mind. We argue that Latourian analysis fails to
uphold its own rigorous aspirations when it reduces
complex literary and cultural representation to
universal allegory.--ar & es

Michael Marder, Terror of the Ethical: On Levinas's Il y 

Abstract:  This essay inquires into the uncanny,
unpredictable, and terrifying dimension of Levinasian
ethics that retains the trace of impersonal existence
or il y a (there is). After establishing that being,
labor, and sense are but folds in the infinite fabric
of the there is, the folds that Levinas terms
"hypostasis," the article follows the double possibility
of their unfolding or unraveling into two infinities:
that of il y a and that of the ethical relation. The
focus is on the inflection of the second infinity by the
first, detectable in the "inter-face" of justice and
ethics in the unique Other who/that contains the
anonymous third (illeity), in the facelessness of the
face connoted by the French visage and the Hebrew panim,
and in the Other's nocturnal non-phenomenality. "Terror
of the ethical" concludes with the hypothesis that
ethics does not stifle the primordial horror of the
there is but temporalizes it, thriving on the
boundlessness and passivity it introduces into my
existence and leaving enough time to fear for the
Other.--mm