Abstract: This essay revisits the ethics of failure in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The novel's narrator, a colonial magistrate, fails to impose a liberal humanist narrative of reconciliation onto the barbarian girl, a racialized native. While much scholarship has focused on this failure, I argue that the novel's self-reflexive fragmentation of its allegorical narrative invites readers to see its stylized and opaque fragments as allegorical signs in themselves—hieroglyphs revealing a political message of community in a visual rather than a narrative form. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Roman Jakobson, my method of interpretation shifts the locus of the novel's allegorical enunciation from the magistrate to the barbarian girl, demonstrating how the novel's formal innovation is imbricated with its ethical and political concerns.

Abstract: Starting from the COVID-19 pandemic—and engaging with works by Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Douglas Crimp, Judith Butler, and others—this essay speculates on the psychic situation of having to work through loss in the absence of the loved one’s corpse. This article also puts forth a concept of “absolute ambivalence” understood as the beyond of the mourning-melancholia dialectic and ultimately relates this concept to the ties that bind the emergence and development of modernity to genocide.

Abstract: Ritland identifies "feeling" and "study" as opposing concepts in the work of British-Jamaican cultural studies founder Stuart Hall. Where "feeling" for cultural theorists like Raymond Williams represented the incorporation of human agents' affective experiences into "culture," Hall found this social model dissatisfying for its elision of the difference between real-world determination and agents' subjective experiences of those worldly conditions. Hall thus forwarded a situated hermeneutics that Ritland calls "migrant study." By referring back to the literary pedagogical approach "practical criticism," Hall was able to insist on a distinction between determination and interpretation to open up opportunities for anticolonial resistance. This model of interpretation is grounded in a version of subaltern agency that views the "text" as an object available to critique through the colonial migrant's very condition of determination.

Abstract: Commenting on Frantz Fanon's account of the material culture created by European colonizers in the aftermath of invasion, Achille Mbembe notes that the colony is fundamentally a state of war, a contest of forces, in which "sensory life"—the continuum of bodies, objects, and landscapes—is a battlefield. "From this point of view," he writes, "colonial domination requires an enormous investment in affect and ceremony and a significant emotional expenditure." This essay argues for a reappraisal of the work of Michel Foucault as a theory of material culture. Linking Foucault's work on power to studies of material culture, it reviews Foucault's late concept of the dispositif , which specifies the ways power is projected by objects like the scaffold and the panopticon. The article then puts Foucault's approach to material culture in conversation with two strands of contemporary critical thought—New Materialism and affect theory—to show how a full-fledged analytics of power–matter–affect might emerge. What Foucault calls the "analytics of power" supports the critical study of affect and ceremony—the streams of force that constitute subjectivity above, beneath, or outside of language. By way of example, this article explores how this emergent framework can provide new resources for moving beyond liberal approaches to the problem of Confederate monuments. Although Foucault is often read as a theorist preoccupied with discourse, a reconsideration of the dispositif shows that Foucault's analytics of power enhances our understanding of the role of material culture in guiding political affects.

Bataille at the Limit of Rapture and Rigor Matt Waggoner (bio) Critical Essays 1: 1944–1948 BY GEORGES BATAILLE, EDITED BY BENJAMIN NOYS AND ALBERTO TOSCANO, TRANSLATED BY CHRIS TURNER Seagull Books, 2023 Critical Essays 1: 1944–1948 (2023) will expand the impressions of Georges Bataille and his writing for many readers. For a long time, nonspecialists or English-only readers have come to know him either through early, idiosyncratic texts in which excess and eroticism predominate both thematically and stylistically, such as the 1928 quasi-pornographic novella Histoire de l'oeil (The Story of the Eye). Or, they have approached Bataille through his postwar monographs, which do not abandon previous themes but pursue them with measured restraint. These include La part maudite (The Accursed Share) (1949), La littérature et le Mal (Literature and Evil) (1957), L'Erotisme (Erotism), Les larmes d'Éros (The Tears of Eros) (1961), and L'Impossible: Histoire de rats suivi de Dianus et de L'Orestie (The Impossible) (1962). Most of the essays in this new volume were written for Critique, the most wide-reaching and influential journal that Bataille edited. Editors Benjamin Noys and Alberto Toscano note that, compared with his pre- and interwar writing, these later works show Bataille transitioning toward what he had indicated in 1943 would be the goal of achieving harmony between rapture and rigor. They also suggest that in these essays we witness a shift away from Bataille's interwar political focus on antifascism toward an effort to judiciously evaluate the two emerging Cold War camps (vii). They argue that Bataille's response to that conflict as it was unfolding provides a window into the broader arc of his thought. [End Page 195] In their introduction, Noys and Toscano survey the many dualities and opposing extremes that characterize Bataille's life and works and that he negotiated by refusing easy reconciliations or sacrificing one for the other. Bataille's dualities began with Nietzsche and good and evil, followed (by way of Durkheim) with the sacred and profane. They argue that Bataille's paradoxical transvaluation of the sacred/profane relation provided a template for what came later, which includes no less paradoxical outcomes of the dualities between immanence and transcendence, expenditure and utility, passion and reason, limits/excess, etc. Like Theodor Adorno's negative dialectic, Bataille's dualisms and extremes never resolve. Noys and Toscano give valuable perspectives on how this translates into Bataille's efforts (on display throughout this volume) to confront his current cultural and political moment. To maintain Cold War "neutrality," for example (at a time when the Non-Aligned Movement was gaining traction), or to be suspicious of those who spoke and wrote about "action" was not, for Bataille, a state of withdrawal. In what they describe as a "hyper-moral" position (or perhaps "meta-moral"), Bataille comprehended the conflicts of his day as competing extremes of an immanent duality, as though the world were fighting against itself for similar goals, and the significance of those goals surpassed what the sides understood themselves to be fighting for. The central argument of Noys and Toscano is that Bataille's essays for Critique captured both sides of his dualistic tendencies in ways that offered valuable alternatives to standard postwar tropes. Looking back on the turbulent texts that he completed just as he was founding Critique—L'expérience intérieure (Inner Experience) (1943) and Le Coupable (Guilty) (1944)—Bataille later reflected that he was not wholly in possession of himself. Unless one was engaged in a comprehensive study of the history of surrealism or interwar France, and (until relatively recently) only if one was in the habit of reading texts in French (some of which, in any case, were not yet available in stand-alone editions but remained part of Gallimard's Oeuvres complètes), the evolution toward Bataille's subsequent style of refined intensity was never fully appreciable.1 Seagull Press's new English translation of essays by Bataille for the journal Critique—the third and final major editorial project he undertook—illuminates a significant stage of this process.2 Critical [End Page 196] Essays 1: 1944–1948 is to be followed by two more forthcoming...

Abstract: This essay discusses the concept of nonchronological time through the philosophies of Paolo Virno and Ernst Bloch, mostly focusing on Virno’s Déjà vu and the End of History , originally published as Il Ricordo del Presente in 1999. In this work, Virno formulates the thesis that capitalism is the first social form that historicizes the metahistorical and nonchronological invariant that defines human life. An important element in Virno’s argument is what he presents as a more radical reinterpretation of Ernst Bloch’s idea of the “contemporaneity of the non-contemporary.” Virno translates Bloch’s notion of ungleichzeitigkeit as coexistence of potentiality and act, or labor-power and commodity. In many respects, Bloch and Virno could be aligned as thinkers of a nonchronological time of possibility in the tradition of historical materialism. However, Virno’s engagement with Bloch seems to be missing central aspects of Bloch’s original formula. Unlike Virno, Bloch’s philosophy does not limit the nonchronological to temporal anteriority or heterogeneity; on the contrary, Bloch’s theory of time uncovers the nonlinear dialectical contradictions between unfinished pasts and open-ended futures.

Abstract: On March 11, 2004, Madrid was hit by devastating train bombings. The attacks and the resulting protests play an important part in Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), but the novel is not simply about them. Instead, Lerner addresses the relationship between literature and politics. Discussing the influence of John Ashbery's and Allen Grossman's work on Lerner, this article shows how the novel develops an understanding of literature as an immediate mediation between the virtual and the actual. Responding to Lerner's challenge to consider "literature now," and drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on democracy to come, the article then explores how an experience of reading is, for Lerner, an experience of temporality and of exposure to an event to come that requires a decisive, improvised response. Concluding with the novel's recontextualization of the Spanish government's response to the Madrid bombings, the article argues that an experience of literature is an experience of deciding the meaning of what is happening here and now, mirroring an experience of democratic politics.

Abstract: Singin' in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952) and Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018) carry a common thread: one (mostly) enacts and the other subverts the "epistemology of the curtain." The curtain, iconic to sound studies' acousmatic sound objects, is a figure of forensic knowing, but Sorry queers it, decentering Singin 's curtained couples with a crowd and highlighting, maybe even repairing, the raced dance theft that Carol Clover first traced in Singin '. Harlem's Black Hoofers of early twentieth-century dance, usually unremunerated and uncredited, return with a vengeance in Sorry as the equisapiens that Cash Green first encounters in a men's room. Where Schaeffer named Pythagoras as a figure for sound studies, the queered curtain of sound studies might call, rather, for Pan.

Abstract: This essay stages a three-way encounter between the 1972 anticolonial film Sambizanga , Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of cinema, and a Fanonian and Afropessimist critique of the human. Directed by the Black Caribbean-French filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020), who recently passed away from complications of COVID-19, Sambizanga dramatizes a moment in the Black Angolan revolutionary struggle against Portuguese colonialism. This essay explores how the images of Sambizanga both exemplify key aspects of the modernist time-image, as formulated in Deleuze's two books on cinema (1986, 1989), and simultaneously demonstrate the time-image concept's inadequacy in describing global fundamental aspects of Black film; Sambizanga materializes a problematization of the cinematic image itself, and demands a new kind of movement. This reading of Maldoror's film facilitates an encounter between Deleuze and Afropessimism, pointing toward an antimmanent orientation. By appropriating a Deleuzian approach to cinema—the analysis of images as presentations of movement and time—for Afropessimist ends, the essay extends Frank Wilderson's (2010) critique of progressivist film narrative to indict the most basic material components of cinema. Utilizing Fanon's auto-theorizing on time and space in Black Skin, White Masks (1952/2008) to denaturalize temporal capacity itself and argue for its fundamental anti-Blackness, the essay locates within Sambizanga two related images of Blackness: the image of incoherence and the image of persistence.