Poéticas para resistir el Capitaloceno:Forma literaria y biopoéticas en la literatura mexicana contemporánea Roberto Cruz Arzabal Es bien conocido el uso del término Antropoceno para referirse a la era geológica actual en la que la actividad humana tiene repercusiones planetarias que superan la escala humana, y cuya mayor consecuencia es el cambio climático.1 Aunque útil y extendido, considero preferible utilizar el término de Capitaloceno, que fue propuesto como una manera de historizar la crisis ecológica y sus causas. El Capitaloceno enfatiza el hecho de que el cambio climático no es consecuencia de la acción humana en general, sino de "un sistema económico en el que los humanos se realizan y en el que ciertos humanos se benefician para enriquecerse. La crisis del planeta no es antropogénica, sino capitologénica" (Serratos 37; curs. orig.). La base histórica de este sistema no se remonta al desarrollo iniciado por la revolución industrial o al "gran aceleramiento" posterior a 1945 como se ha señalado en las definiciones del Antropoceno (Ellis). Aunque estos momentos cambiaron la escala de la intervención humana en el entorno, no hubieran podido suceder sin condiciones de posibilidad materiales e ideológicas que permitieran el desarrollo moderno y sus crisis. Entre las varias condiciones que lo hicieron [End Page 460] posible destacan la lenta expansión colonial europea y el conocimiento de la naturaleza mediante una taxonomía que jerarquizaba y atomizaba especies en competencia. Esto permitió establecer las bases de la economía política del capitalismo mediante la idea de una naturaleza barata en dos sentidos: de costo bajo y sometida al abaratamiento, es decir, la producción de una ideología que separe la naturaleza de lo humano para que esta pueda ser explotada a merced de las necesidades de crecimiento. El capitalismo crea el Capitaloceno porque es "a new way of organizing nature, and therefore a new way of organizing the relations between work, reproduction, and the conditions of life" (Moore 85). El Capitaloceno tiene una dimensión cognitiva especialmente angustiante: la conciencia de que la devastación ha sucedido y sigue sucediendo, aun cuando no seamos capaces de entender sus dimensiones y sus escalas. Una diferencia entre el periodo geológico previo, el Holoceno, y el Capitaloceno es que este último no sólo implica la intervención humana sobre el entorno planetario sino también, en su último periodo, la capacidad de integrarla en el sensorium colectivo (McBrien 124-134). Para Amitav Ghosh, una parte importante de la imposibilidad de pensar los cambios sucedidos durante el Antropoceno se debe a la expulsión de lo no humano de la "ficción seria". Por ello es que no pocas veces los avisos de la catástrofe se han manifestado en géneros "menores" o marginales de las tradiciones dominante, o bien en las tradiciones periféricas; el dilema que el cambio climático impone a la cultura, dice Ghosh, no es solamente científico, sino cultural: es un problema de imaginación (9). El Capitaloceno ha erosionado la confianza en lo que la literatura puede hacer en el mundo por venir que aparece en nuestra angustia (Parham 4); por ello, la representación es uno de los problemas fundamentales de lo humano ante la crisis climática (Anderson XIX). Es importante estudiar no sólo los elementos temáticos sino también las dimensiones formales en las que se presentan, las escalas que las formas recrean e imaginan. Esto se ha estudiado mayormente en novelas. Sin embargo, resulta notable que no pocos de estos imaginarios existan en literaturas que se alejan del realismo. Que la narrativa no mimética pueda escapar al dictado de lo verosímil privilegiando la ambigüedad y los vacíos de interpretación la acerca a géneros con un menor potencial mimético como la poesía lírica y, todavía más, la poesía experimental. La poesía es un género en el que la naturaleza ha tenido un papel fundamental debido a su tendencia histórica a la contemplación. [End Page 461] Piénsese en la...

This article traces the growth of representations of literary infrastructure in Argentinean literature parallel to the rise of global finance capital and the successive price and debt crises it has visited upon the Argentinean economy since the restoration of liberal democracy in 1983. I argue that as Argentina’s robust mid-century literary institution has declined, the concrete organizations that constitute its infrastructure—for example publishing houses, educational institutions, cultural bureaucracies—become fodder for literary fiction. In short, literature represents its own infrastructure when that infrastructure comes to present a problem. My claim rests at once on the logics of the literary institution and literary form as well as the history of Argentina’s political economy and its effect on cultural institutions. This is at once a position paper about methods of cultural analysis and an outline for an institutionalist history of contemporary Argentinean literature culminating in a close reading of two works, César Aira’s El congreso de la literatura (1996) and Pola Oloixarac’s Mona (2018), that are exemplary of what I call Argentina’s literature of infrastructure.

Soldiers' Tales: On Soldiers' Writing in Early Modern Spanish Literature–On Miguel Martínez's Front Lines:Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World and Faith Harden's Arms and Letters, Military Life Writing in Early Modern Spain Andrea Nate Martínez, Miguel. Front Lines: Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. 320 pp. Harden, Faith. Arms and Letters, Military Life Writing in Early Modern Spain. Iberic, 2020. 200 pp. Miguel Martínez's Front Lines: Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World and Faith Harden's Arms and Letters, Military Life Writing in Early Modern Spain are welcome contributions to Hispanic Studies and the military and literary history of Spain. These thorough and illuminating monographs on soldiers' writing in the early modern Spanish empire gather unique corpuses of an understudied area of Golden Age Spanish literature. The two books dialogue with each other, as well with the larger field of Golden Age Spanish literary studies. At the same time, they explore diverse literary works and authors, each thus offering unique and varied contributions to the field. Martínez's book is as imaginative as it is based on solid evidence, as he reconstructs the lives and personal situations of the writers that he examines. In this ample survey, he is interested in how soldiers of varying backgrounds and social class wrote and received literary texts. His main goal is to show how soldiers experimented with new modes of writing and how they called into question military practices through this writing, thus contributing significantly to Spanish Renaissance literature. Arranged into five chapters and including an introduction, an epilogue, and end notes, Front Lines encapsulates several exciting stories of soldiers whose work exposes the injustices and harsh conditions that they endured for the sake of imperial expansion. Highlighting the biographies of soldier writers and subsequently linking their life experiences to the texts that they wrote, Martínez argues that soldierly literature was essential in the articulation of what he eloquently describes as a society or republic of soldiers and their collective identity (37). Martínez debunks the commonly accepted image of the illiterate soldier and conquistador by providing evidence and statistics that attest to more widespread literacy among soldiers of the hidalguía and plebeian classes who dedicated commentaries and war narratives to their commanders. Notable, [End Page 529] too, is his discussion of the new practice of war reporting and disciplinary socialization among the ranks, which may have contributed to literacy, and is central to Martínez's project. These soldier writers employed popular Spanish Medieval and Golden Age rhetorical conventions, such as false humility, which the early modernist argues suggests that they were not only familiar with other Golden Age genres, but that they were also reading each other's work. The monograph branches out to canvas the written work of soldiers on the edges of the far flung Early Modern Spanish empire: the New World and the Mediterranean. Martínez then discusses contrasting types of heroic discourse while adroitly situating Spanish soldierly writing within its greater European literary context. For example, his analysis of how Spanish plebeian soldiers and arquebusiers appropriated medieval French and Italian epic convincingly shows how soldiers' poetry circulated through, and despite, the imperial spaces of war and all their geographical and political complexity. With a particular focus on Spanish plático soldier writers in Italy, Martínez comments on images of and tensions between the courtier and the soldier, as well as new literary forms that better fit the popular soldiery than previous trends. Particularly valuable about Martínez's reading of these works is the way that he juxtaposes canonical texts, such as the Quijote, alongside lesser-known works such as Baltasar de Hierro's autobiographical epic poem La Destruición de África, one of first accounts of mutiny told from inside a garrison in the understudied battle of Mahdia, Tunisia. In this original part of the project, Martínez looks at how the author appropriates the classical and medieval epic into the Spanish Golden Age. Indeed, his analysis achieves a clear exposition of how several Spanish Golden Age phenomena come to light in...

Reviewed by: Patricios en contienda. Cuadros de costumbres, reformas liberales y representación del pueblo en Hispanoamérica (1830–1880) by Felipe Martínez-Pinzón Brendan Lanctot Martínez-Pinzón, Felipe. Patricios en contienda. Cuadros de costumbres, reformas liberales y representación del pueblo en Hispanoamérica (1830–1880). U of North Carolina P, Department of Romance Studies, 2021. 396 pp. Felipe Martínez-Pinzón's Patricios en contienda: Cuadros de costumbres, reformas liberales y representación del pueblo en Hispanoamérica (1830–1880) convincingly argues that the brief and often humorous sketches of social types known as cuadros de costumbres constituted an important discursive space where elites promoted competing visions of the people, the ultimate source of legitimacy for nascent republican projects. In addition to representing various popular subjects, letrados fashioned literary profiles of notabilidades to establish their own qualifications for guiding such an undertaking. This book rethinks costumbrismo as something more than isolated vignettes or mere precursors to more prestigious literary forms. Martínez-Pinzón is not concerned with establishing a definitive corpus or conventions of a particular genre, and his study sidesteps such questions by defining his object of study as "literatura panorámica," a phrase borrowed from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. This phrase evokes the emerging popular visual culture of the Atlantic world and permits Martínez-Pinzón to situate his deft readings of cuadros de costumbres produced in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela during the half-century that [End Page 541] followed the dissolution of Gran Colombia in that broader, cosmopolitan framework. Just as crucially, it designates a mode of writing that not only dialogues with, but is embedded in the novel, geographic discourse, statistical sciences, and history. A major achievement of Patricios en contienda is how, over the course of its nine chapters, it reconstructs exchanges, re-editions, and polemics that played out in the newspapers, broadsheets, albums, and other printed materials in order to analyze how letrados sought to compose a pueblo nacional. In a sense, this book is itself an album that gathers and reedits a variety of materials, both written and graphic. Its three-hundred fifty pages (followed by a bibliography of nearly thirty pages, in a smaller font) are divided in three parts, each of which consists of three chapters. Each chapter, in turn, is broken into a number of titled subsections (usually five or six). Within these main chapters, there is no formal marco teórico or separate historical context; instead, Martínez-Pinzón's prose integrates the book's vast secondary bibliography, typically in the form of brief citations. Structurally and stylistically, then, this is a project that emulates its object of study, whose "métodos de recorte y ensamblaje, le [sic?] permitieron a estos compiladores 'desear el mundo' de otras maneras" (72). "Sensibilidades patricias," the first section of the book, focuses on the "galleries," "museums," "pantheons," and other similarly named publications that set new criteria of belonging for those aspiring to shape a nascent republican order. Surveying such competing initiatives by José María Vergara y Vergara, the Bolet brothers, and José María Samper, among others, Martínez-Pinzón detects "a sensibilidad patricia" that was "[n]i liberal ni conservadora, afectiva y condescendiente, embozadamente violenta… [que] confundía, en su propio beneficio, paz con pacificación, educación con disciplina, armonía con privilegio e historia con épica familiar o étnica" (113). In scrutinizing letrados' self-fashioning via bocetos of their chosen precursors, Patricios en contienda reveals the limits of framing of the intellectual debates of post-independence as merely an extension of civil war by other means (as Rafael Rojas does in Los derechos del alma: Ensayos sobre la querella liberal-conservadora en Hispanoamérica (1830–1870)). The second and third sections of the book shift from patrician self-representation to the depiction of those subaltern subjects that elites seek to pacify, educate, and discipline in order to integrate or exclude them from the pueblo. Part two, titled "Un pueblo para la patria" focuses primarily on the indigenous and mestizo inhabits of the hinterlands that intellectuals regard as the cradle of barbarism, which threatens the fledgling state, but...

Reviewed by: Dividuals. The Split Human and Humanist Split in Early Modern Spanish Literature by Julio Baena Bradley J. Nelson Baena, Julio. Dividuals. The Split Human and Humanist Split in Early Modern Spanish Literature. UP of the South, 2020. VI + 380 pp. Not often does one encounter a new framework for understanding the entire breadth of early modern Spanish literature, especially one that deepens our historical understanding of early modern Spain while at the same time illuminating our current historical and political predicaments. Julio Baena's Dividuals. The Split Human and Humanist Split in Early Modern Spanish Literature does just that by providing a complexly-structured and yet pithy narrative that comprises a Mannerist approach to early as well as late modern critical, political, and ethical antagonisms and conundrums. In characterizing Baena's approach as mannerist, I am following the author's evocation of Arnold Hauser's classical definition of Mannerism, which underlines the tendency of sixteenth-century art and literature to privilege learned readers and spectators in artifacts that are "anti-humanist in character, resulting in the 'abolition of the balance between body and soul, mind and matter' (9)" (247). Baena's criticism has always invited his readers to reflect on the too-often overlooked period of Mannerism, especially in Spanish literature, and this is his most convincing study to date in its location of the Modern "split between 'matter' and 'psyche'… in the middle of the 16th century," specifically, in the incommensurable contrast and opposition between the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes and Jorge Montemayor's La Diana (8). His extended reflection on the ways in which these two works illuminate central aspects Juan Carlos Rodríguez's Marxist study of the rise of capitalistic animism out of medieval organicist economic and social relations serves as a powerful tool for locating and analyzing the mind-body split and its continuing radical potential for upsetting modern attempts to either close the wounds or transcend the constitutive economic and social violence of capitalistic relations of production at the heart of modern economic and political life. Baena's narrative moves between Marx, Rodríguez, and Althusser on the historical and materialist side and Freud, Lacan, and Zizek on the psychoanalytical side—this in spite of Zizek's continued consideration of the common root and utility of the Marxist and Freudian understandings of the "symptom" of the limits of capitalism and psychoanalysis. By leaving open the space between Lazarillo and Diana, Marx and Freud, and early modern Spain and [End Page 535] our contemporary moment, Baena refuses to provide the narrative closure offered by the Baroque comedia nueva, for example, and thereby compels us to recognize our own dividuality in the split nature of the historical periods and literary artifacts we study and teach. Ground zero of this study is the cult of the modern, autonomous, and self-sufficient individual, especially the way that the search for individual authenticity, fed by social media algorithms, "takes over any and all the weapons that identity offered to the collective" (2). Following Deleuze and Guatarri as well as the Spanish philosopher Agustín García Calvo, individuality is read here as an obstacle to organizing collective action against an unleashed neoliberal capitalism that threatens to overwhelm all opposition to its subjective and collective oppression, which consists in the isolation each individual in their own mirrored silos. Lazarillo de Tormes is read, thus, as an example of how to respond to egregious attempts to download the responsibility for structural economic and social crimes onto the shoulders of the individual, marginal or not. Lázaro's narration of his experiences with multiple masters, culminating in his role as 'pimp' for his own wife, reveals the corrosive relationship between success and moral integrity in a fallen world. "Lazarillo, thus, stands not just for the Picaresque, but for all literary texts of the Renaissance centered on the reality of exploitation, poverty, the materiality of Man, and especially his needs, his wants" (Baena 8). By contrast, La Diana is read as an escapist fantasy that produces conflicts of desire that can only be resolved through a collective ritual of forgetting, a forgetting which leads not to the fulfilment of individual...

Renuncia a la Ciudadanía e Imaginación Postnacional en la Obra Exílica de Josep Solanes Mari Paz Balibrea En la entrada biográfica que nos proporciona la Real Academia de la Historia, Josep Solanes aparece como un reconocido científico de estatura internacional, educado y titulado en dos países, con una exitosa trayectoria en tres como psiquiatra que combina publicaciones científicas con el ejercicio de cargos de gran responsabilidad médica y académica, además de otros honoríficos ("José Solanes Vilapreñó). Sin quitarle mérito ni brillantez a la carrera de Solanes, es sin embargo perentorio señalar lo que aquí brilla por su ausencia: la historia. Irónico, si se quiere, considerando la institución autora de la entrada, pero no sorprendente para quien algo sepa de las polémicas generadas alrededor del contenido de su magno y pagado con dinero público Diccionario Biográfico Español (Ledesma). Que la dimensión internacional de la carrera de Solanes estuviera condicionada por su catalanismo de izquierdas y su participación como médico psiquiatra del ejército republicano durante la Guerra Civil que le obligó a abandonar definitivamente el país en 1939 es indiferente a la asepsia narrativa que aquí quiere pasar como sinónimo de objetividad. Y sin embargo, el que Solanes fuera un exiliado político condicionó completamente su trayectoria vital y profesional, determinando el sesgo de sus intereses intelectuales y científicos, y llevándole a profundizar su exploración de las intersecciones entre psiquiatría, fenomenología y [End Page 378] literatura.1 Determinó, también, la casi nula recepción de su obra en España, en especial Los nombres del exilio.2 Es esta su teorización más ambiciosa sobre el destierro y una de las más sugerentes e iluminadoras contribuciones al tema en el corpus cultural del exilio republicano, del que solo se suele destacar la obra de María Zambrano. Este libro publicado póstumamente en Venezuela en 1993 (Solanes había muerto en 1991), recoge y desarrolla el trabajo de su tesis doctoral Les noms de l'exil et l'espace de l'émigration: étude anthropologique. Solanes había estado trabajando en esta tesis entre 1939 y 1949 durante su primer exilio en Francia, cuando publicó sus primeras reflexiones de la vivencia del destierro ("El clima," "Els remeis," "Exil et troubles"). Sabemos que la tenía casi lista cuando marchó a Venezuela en 1949 (Solanes, "Carta") con la intención de volver pronto a Francia a defenderla en la Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail. En realidad, no lo hizo hasta 1980, lo que le dio 35 años más desde su definitivo exilio venezolano para retrabajar el tema, tanto en la tesis (Grases 12) como en otras publicaciones (La estructura). En Los nombres, Solanes hace el inventario de una rica gama de posiciones existenciales ante la realidad del exilio, apoyándose en un acercamiento fenomenológico que convierte la historia de la literatura en un repositorio en el que han quedado registradas múltiples evidencias de experiencias vividas del exilio. Es significativo que uno de los más perceptivos y mejor conocidos estudiosos de la experiencia del exilio, el también exiliado republicano, en su caso de segunda generación, Claudio Guillén, no parece tener noticia de Los nombres del exilio ni de ninguna otra publicación anterior de Solanes. Su libro El sol de los desterrados, publicado dos años después de Los nombres y que, desde su acercamiento de literatura comparada comparte mucho del enfoque, la erudición y la terminología de Solanes, no le menciona. Ni siquiera las redes que conocemos del exilio, de las que sabemos ambos formaron parte, por lo que he podido averiguar, acertaron a recoger el legado de Solanes. Las causas estructurales que han obstruido el conocimiento y estudio del legado del exilio republicano español (Balibrea y Faber) se exacerban en Solanes. Con este trabajo pretendo, claro está, contribuir a contrarrestar el efecto de estas obstrucciones, destacando cómo los escritos de Solanes sobre el exilio están vinculados [End Page 379] a la reflexión sobre la experiencia...

Stimmung as an Aesthetic Category: On Influx & Efflux Friederike Reents (bio) In order to “add something to the aesthetic” within the “formative process” (Bennett x) of “influx and efflux,” I would like to engage not only with Walt Whitman, but with Jane Bennett on the aesthetic category of the German word Stimmung, which is not widely used in English-language criticism and lacks a one-word equivalent in this language. As a “half-thing” (Schmitz 21) between the “inside and outside,” the aesthetic category Stimmung seems to offer an answer to the question being posed in Influx & Efflux: “how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences.” Stimmung seems to be very close to the idea of Jane Bennett’s book: it represents the “hover-time of transformation” (x), the “interval between the impression and the expression” (Thoreau, qtd. in Bennett x), between the “influx and efflux.” Via Stimmung, the I becomes “absorbent and creative”; Stimmung, just like Influx & Efflux, “sketch[es] out another mode of subjectivity and action.” Stimmung, usually translated as “mood” or “atmosphere,” on the one hand, or “attunement,” on the other,1 has had a remarkable comeback not only in critical discourse of the past decade but in contemporary literature and poetics as well. This comeback seems [End Page 1042] to be connected to the bridging function possessed by Stimmung and its intellectual, potentially highly connective idea between subject and object. Stimmung belongs to the history of music theory, where it can mean simply “tuning,” but where it was also used to describe the psychological effects of the medium. The word has since been used metaphorically (intermedially) to describe everything from landscape paintings to Romantic poetry to modern art. In existential and neo-phenomenological discourse, Stimmung is understood as a “half-thing” (“Halbding”), one that can be physically sensed but which is neither visible nor touchable, etc. Through a reading of the collaborative poem State of Gunk. Swine in Full Mourning (from Helmet of Phlox, a nineteen-chapter treatise by a collective of five German poets), I will attempt to show that by means of Stimmung, to use Bennett’s words, the “forces of nonhuman agencies and the ubiquity of stupendous, ethereal influences are acknowledged, become more felt, and given more of their due, become slightly more susceptible to being inflected”—maybe even “toward an egalitarian politics” (116). The concept of Stimmung tries to add something to the idea of “influx and efflux” in order to be open and attentive, susceptible to others and welcoming influences, perhaps even to realize the idea of an ecological democracy. In the treatise Helm aus Phlox, Ann Cotten, Daniel Falb, Steffen Popp, Hendrik Jackson, and Monika Rinck include in their discussion of problems that they encounter while writing poetry the (un)translatability of the word Stimmung(en), as exemplified by their collaborative poem Status Matsch. Schweine in Volltrauer (State of Gunk. Swine in Full Mourning; 92). It is worth reading that text against the background of Jane Bennett’s explorations of “the experience of being continuously subject to influence and still managing to add something to the mix” (xiii): State of Gunk. Swine in Full MourningPig brain in the air, pig brain in the air!Who is there? Who is there?Disembodied heads on a conveyor beltblow blow mush!blow blow mush! then along came a clever little translatorthen along came a clever little translator why, you’re ill!pins and needles in the arms, pins and needles in the legsthe brains are wobbling, and flying from brain to brain!No one understands except the translator!No one understands except the translator!2 [End Page 1043] Status Matsch. Schweine in VolltrauerSchweinhirn in der Luft. Schweinhirn in der Luft!Wer nach mir ruft? Wer nach mir ruft?abgetrennte Köpfe auf einem Förderbandpust pust Brei!pust pust Brei! da kam eine kluge Übersetzerin daherda kam eine kluge Übersetzerin daher ihr seid ja krank!die Arme kribbeln, die Beine kribbelndie Hirne schwabbeln, und fliegen von Hirn zu Hirn!Das versteht nur die Übersetzerin!Das versteht nur die Übersetzerin! (92) The poem perplexes the reader with what seem to...

Reviewed by: On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei George Pattison (bio) Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life. Oxford UP, 2021. 320 pages. As Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei observes, the last few years have seen a significant resurgence of interest in existentialism, both in and beyond the academy. Authors and texts who were dismissed during the time when postmodernism was the rallying-cry of the progressive academy are being rediscovered and re-applied in a wide variety of ways. It almost goes without saying, however, that if a renewed existentialism is to become a significant contributor to the ongoing conversation that is philosophy, it will not and cannot be exactly the same as the old existentialism. Indeed, the flyleaf refers to the book as offering “a new vision of existentialism,” a claim that is, I think, fully justified by the contents. Gosetti-Ferencei’s version of existentialism shows a deep and extensive immersion in the relevant classic texts, but it also brings these into dialogue with our contemporary concerns while interpreting and applying them with a generosity and kindness that was notably absent from [End Page 1057] at least some of its original representatives, though not all (there’s not much kindness in Sartre, for example). An opening chapter establishes what will become a theme throughout the study: that whilst the “existentialist café” of 1940s Paris rightly plays a crucial part in the formation of existentialism, there is much more to existentialism than the cigarettes, roll-neck jumpers, and sexually adventurous lifestyles of the Left Bank intelligentsia. We are warned that existentialism is a diverse and difficult philosophy and that it would be a mistake to reduce it to one or other catchphrase. Indeed, in Part II, Gosetti-Ferencei takes us through the intellectual genealogy of existentialism, from ancient philosophy, through romanticism, and on into the twentieth century, a story that strongly supports the claim that existentialism was not just a momentary philosophical fad. Startling as its rhetoric and style were to many post-war Anglophone readers, its fundamental questions and concerns were deeply and extensively rooted in the history of Western philosophy, all the way back through Descartes’ “turn to the subject” and the Stoics’ culture of self-formation to Parmenides’ meditations on being. Due attention is given to existentialism’s immediate nineteenth-century predecessors (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche) and to the complex interrelationship between existentialist philosophy in the narrow sense and cultural forms such as literature and jazz that became closely associated with it. This not only brings in Kafka and Rilke but also persuasively argues for the creative role of African-American writers and musicians such as Miles Davis in shaping existentialism and, importantly, not merely adapting it to their specific intellectual, personal, and cultural needs. Franz Fanon is, of course, also represented as a significant existentialist voice in his own right. This inclusion should not surprise us, since the experience of affirming black identity in a world shaped by hegemonic white voices resonates powerfully with the existentialist theme of a chronic mismatch between the individual’s self-experience and the demands of the social environment. Having prepared the ground for an examination of the core themes of existentialism, a third section examines these thematically under the headings “The Self,” “Others,” “World,” “Earth,” and “Being.” As can already be inferred from these topics, Gosetti-Ferencei does not simply accept Sartre’s view that the subject’s relationship to the non-human world is a relationship of mutual exclusion but goes some distance with Heidegger in affirming our relation to the earth as a proper medium in which to develop an authentic relation to being. Sartre’s aversion is, of course, well known from the novel Nausea, referred to (and rightly) at several moments in the book, but we also learn that it went to such an extreme that he only liked fruit when it had been processed, as in jam. A final section offers ten short essays on how existentialism might be applied to, e.g., seeking authenticity and avoiding the lure of role models (even existentialist role models), how to take and...

Keeping Company: Phenomenologies of Perception Jane Bennett (bio) What is the right genre for a response-to-responses to a book? A friend suggested, simply, that it is the conversation. The generous, subtle, and thoughtful responses offered by Felski, Reents, and Herzogenrath do me the honor of conversing, from the Latin “conversārī, literally, to turn oneself about, to move to and fro, ... keep company with” (OED Online).1 Here, the converse is not the reverse but the ongoing; to converse can be to convert, but it can also be to add some more verses. Each of these interlocutors contributes to a song about sense and sensibility, or what might also be called a more-than-human phenomenology of perception, one that attends carefully to perception’s outside, to, that is, its animal, vegetable, mineral, and etherial prompts and participants. I will try to keep the conversation going. Friederike Reents hums to the tune of Stimmung, offered alongside “influence,” which I got from Thoreau. Both terms mark a subtle power of difference-making, which is real but perhaps too cloudy and filled with open possibilities to count as a “cause.” Stimmung is a “tuning” (in the musical sense) and as such is a to-and-fro (as between instrument, sound, ears, hand, strings). Stimmung has been translated as “atmosphere,” but that word is not perfect because Stimmung is not only something out there around us but also a mood within. Stimmung is better than influence at marking that inherent doubleness—of inside and outside. Stimmung, says Reents, physically alters experience and yet operates below the radar of ordinary human sense-perception. [End Page 1048] Stimmung, one could say, is a presence or an affectivity that strikes a tone in people without them knowing what hit them, or even that they’ve been hit. And yet, one finds oneself feeling or doing or saying things somewhat differently. Reents also improves my discussion of “bad influence,” by adding the example of the inhalation of atomized pig brains at an American meat processing plant where workers are afflicted neurologically by the influx. In presenting this example, Reents gently conjoins postcolonial and eco-materialist styles of thinking/feeling. The Stimmung of the factory embodies the subjective experiences of affliction, exploitation, mourning, and sympathy, while it also consists in an objective field of pressurized air guns, human animal and nonhuman animal flesh, cries and noise, etc. Blow blow mush! blow blow mush!.... the brains are wobbling, and flying from brain to brain! Those lines from the collaborative poem State of Gunk. Swine in Full Mourning, which Reents cites, explode the textbook image of “brain circuitry”: they no longer indicate a system of intra-body neural pathways protected by a skull and responsible for intelligent survival; the circuit becomes trans-body and chaotic, as the violently exploded brains of nonhuman animals (bred to be eaten) infuse the brains of human animals (laboring to make a living by processing pigs into pork). Reents offers this horrible example with grace, to the effect of skillfully enacting an anti-capitalist critique alongside an affirmation of the vitality of (all sorts of) materials. Such a combination is important, and too rare. As Rita Felski notes, there’s nothing about ecological, network, or new materialist approaches that prevents criticisms of neoliberalism, even if those approaches would also insist “that capitalism is neither the sole actor nor the master actor—that there are many vectors of power and inequality, that persons cannot be reduced to effects of structures, and any account of social relations must leave ample room for contingency, unpredictability, and surprise” (Limits 17). In other rounds of conversation, we could talk more about how capitalist exploitation operates by means of the vitality of matter—a vibrancy it never ceases to highlight in its commodities and to obscure with regard to the workers, animals, plants, and landscapes treated as “raw materials of production.” Or, on the same trail, treated as what Frantzen and Bjering describe as “the hyperabject,” as “trash, unusable, unsellable, outside any [profit-driven economic and political] process” (100). [End Page 1049] Reents also adds to the tones of “sympathy” by her example of the woman who translates the...

On explore ici la pertinence de la pensée de Catherine Malabou pour différentes pratiques artistiques – picturale, musicale, littéraire. À la lumière de ses diverses interventions philosophiques, on cherche à mettre en évidence toute l’importance des arts dans l’avènement des formes de fuite dans nos sociétés. La notion de l’ontologie de l’accident dans le cadre de la catastrophe écologique à venir nous offre également la possibilité de réfléchir à l’évolution d’une pensée multi-spéciste dans les arts. Le choc ontologique chez Malabou est mis en rapport avec la notion du style tardif dans les écrits d’Edward Saïd pour aboutir à une lecture de la fin de vie des artistes. L’analyse d’un tableau de Giotto nous permet de montrer enfin comment c’est le propre d’un certain type de plasticité de pouvoir interrompre sa propre automaticité.