CONTENTS 

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Carrie Noland, Motor Intentionality: Gestural Meaning in 
Bill Viola and Merleau-Ponty

Jeffrey T. Nealon, The Swerve Around P: Literary Theory after 
Interpretation

Robert Hughes, Riven: Badiou's Ethical Subject and the 
Event of Art as Trauma

E.L. McCallum, Toward a Photography of Love: The Tain of the 
Photograph in Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red

Jim Hicks, Narrowing the Range of Permissible Lies: Recent 
Battles in the International Image Tribunal

Arkady Plotnitsky, Badiou's Equations--and Inequalities: A 
Response to Robert Hughes's "Riven"


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                      Reviews
 
      Steven Helmling, Adorno Public and Private. A review of 
T.W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (Cambridge: 
Polity, 2006); Adorno, Letters to His Parents: 1939-1951 
(Cambridge: Polity, 2006); Adorno and Thomas Mann, Correspondence 
1943-1955 (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); and Christina Gerhardt, 
ed., "Adorno and Ethics," special issue of New German Critique 
97 (Winter 2006).

      Kyle A. Wiggins, Futures of Negation: Jameson's 
Archaeologies of the Future and Utopian Science Fiction. A review 
of Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire 
Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005).

      Eric Keenaghan, Performance and Politics in Contemporary 
Poetics: Three Recent Titles from Atelos Press. A review of Laura 
Moriarty, Ultravioleta (Berkeley: Atelos, 2006); Jocelyn 
Saidenberg, Negativity (Berkeley: Atelos, 2006); and Juliana 
Spahr, The Transformation (Berkeley: Atelos, 2006.

      Brook Miller, "BONKS and BLIGHTY? Oh, Tabloid Britain!" A 
review of Martin Conboy, Tabloid Britain: Constructing A Community 
Through Language. New York: Routledge, 2006.


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                  Notices (HTML Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Jim Hicks, Narrowing the Range of Permissible Lies: Recent 
Battles in the International Image Tribunal

    * Abstract: The essay investigates the representational 
constraints and presuppositions that generate images of war 
and influence their reception, or lack of reception, by the 
U.S. public. Such journalism still largely follows 
representational practices put into place during the 
eighteenth century, a structure of representation that has 
outlived its usefulness. Following Bruno Latour's 
observation that, for critique, the "question was never to 
get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting 
empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism," it is 
suggested that recent controversies over war photos, and over 
those of Abu Ghraib in particular, often substitute an argument 
about images for one that confronts the acts they depict. The 
"prisoner abuse" story is of course far from settled; in fact 
it's hardly been opened. And yet, as Ernesto Sabato's preface 
to Nunca Mas (the work published by the Argentine National 
Commission on the Disappeared) demonstrated long ago, properly 
applied, even narratology can have policy implications. --jh 

Robert Hughes, Riven: Badiou's Ethical Subject and the Event 
of Art as Trauma

    * Abstract: The essay opens with a general consideration 
of art and ethics in Badiou's philosophy in order to describe 
his subject as faithful to an event that pierces a given 
situation with its hitherto indiscernible truth. The essay then 
establishes connections between Badiou's work on the void of 
the situation, the hole of truth, and the rivenness of the 
subject, and Lacan's work on trauma and the real. This 
connection is seen in Badiou's description of truth as a radical 
alterity befalling the subject and constituting a hole in the 
existing order of language. The subject remains ethically 
faithful to a truth by introducing it into the language of 
the situation in which that truth appears. Because the existing 
situation cannot articulate a truth radically novel and 
alterior to itself, the subject must "poeticize" in order to 
name any truth, as this essay shows, whether artistic, amorous, 
political, or scientific. By describing Badiou's subject of art 
in terms of trauma, Badiou's theory of art is placed in relation 
with that of the Romantics. By describing Badiou's ethical 
subject in terms of trauma, the essay places Badiou's ethics in 
relation to Levinas's. The extent and limits of this comparison 
clarify Badiou's critique of Levinas, which is less general than 
commonly supposed, and help to intervene in potential misreadings 
of Badiou's work, which resists the pathos and horror typically 
attached to ethical considerations of trauma and the real. --rh

E.L. McCallum, Toward a Photography of Love: The Tain of the 
Photograph in Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red

    * Abstract: This essay examines the idea of the verbal 
photograph, particularly those in Anne Carson's novel 
Autobiography of Red and Barthes's winter garden photograph in 
Camera Lucida. The essay argues for a reconsideration of classic 
photography theory in light of the tensions around these seemingly 
absent photographs, suggesting that a counterpoint to the 
dominant equation of photography and death in photography theory 
is the alliance, abetted through narrative, of photography and 
love. --em 

Jeffrey T. Nealon, The Swerve Around P: Literary Theory after 
Interpretation

    * Abstract: The "P" in "The Swerve around 'P'" refers to the 
Library of Congress designation for language, literature, and 
literary criticism/theory; the essay reflects on the fact that 
a lot of the work that's produced in literature departments these 
days doesn't end up in that section of the library (or, conversely, 
much of the research on the "P" shelves finds its primary 
engagements elsewhere: in history, sociology, science and technology, 
philosophy, social science, and so on). Literary scholarship isn't 
"literary" in quite the same way it was even a decade ago, in the 
sense that it's no longer primarily concerned with producing rival 
interpretations of existing or emerging literary artifacts. The 
reason there's no hot new interpretive paradigm on the horizon is 
not so much because of the exhaustion of theory itself, but because 
the work of interpretation is no longer the primary research work of 
literature departments. However, it is precisely in the name of 
re-imagining a research future for literary theory that I turn to 
Alain Badiou's account of the literary's demise in recent philosophy. 
My provocation here, if I have one at all, is to ask theoreticians 
to rethink possible relations among literature and philosophy, other 
than in the key of interpretation--which (despite ubiquitous claims 
to the contrary) has been the dominant research practice of the "big 
theory" era in North America.--jtn 

Carrie Noland, Motor Intentionality: Gestural Meaning in Bill Viola 
and Merleau-Ponty

    * Abstract: The rise of new media studies has brought attention 
to artists such as Bill Viola while renewing scholarly interest in 
the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This essay provides analyses of 
Merleau-Ponty and Viola that go against the grain of current 
scholarship on them both. By privileging the category of the 
gestural--central in Merleau-Ponty's meditations but often eclipsed 
in recent criticism--the essay contradicts a trend in new media theory 
that associates embodiment not with motor intentionality but instead 
with a far more mysterious entity called "affect." Reading Viola's 
The Passions through Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, the 
essay brings to bear the author's experience as a movement practitioner 
to restore the register of gestural performance to Viola's visual 
images. --cn