Existentialism as a World Theory Alex Taek-Gwang Lee (bio) Existentialism and the Third World The Cold War following the traumatic experiences of enduring warfare forced the Korean intellectuals to distort the political implication of the global philosophical movements and emphasize its empirical elements through their translations of Sartre. The ideology of the Cold War distorted Sartre's influence on the Korean intellectuals, and their reception of his philosophy was saturated with the myth of Bildung. For them, existentialism was regarded as a channel through which they could get access to the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment. Of course, there lied the irony of national identification behind this passion for global intellectualism. Nationalism made an excuse for reading Sartre, even though his philosophy must be classified leftist thought. Existentialism was clearly supportive of the Third World against the political polarization of the Cold War. From the nationalist perspective, existentialism showed a possible way towards the philosophy of the non-European, but at the same time, it seemed pro-communist to those who agreed with the anti-communist world order. The Korean War devastated the public sphere, and the frame of the Cold War severed a nation into two peoples. Each Korea competed to command ideological hegemony in the political conflict. In this way, existentialism served as the alternative prism of intellectualism by which Koreans in the South could critique the Stalinist Koreans in the North. Indeed, Sartre was a symbolic intellectual leading the anti-Stalinist left and as such suggested another perspective contra orthodox Marxist-Leninism. During the colonial period, Keijo Imperial University, now Seoul National University in the capital city of the Korean Peninsula, was a shelter for Japanese Marxists and its academic tradition of Marxism influenced many Korean students and scholars even after the end of the Second World War. In a sense, North Korea was a perfect laboratory for them in which they tried to realize the Marxist theory. Drawing on Lenin's and Stalin's ambition about the "reform in humanity," Koreans taking on North Korea as their republic [End Page 405] were optimistic about the victory of socialism. On the contrary, Koreans in the South had to prove their ideological justification in opposition to the overwhelming popularity of socialist demands. From this historical background, Sartre's critique of Stalinism provided those who railed against North Korea with a compelling logic to validate their anti-communism. This situation in which the intellectuals in South Korea received Sartre was quite the opposite of the one in which existentialism was taken as the theoretical rationale of the non-aligned movement in the Third World. For instance, Sartre was the only European philosopher attracting public attention in the Middle East. Furthermore, his engagement with the political situation of the Third World changed the relationship between the West and the non-West. According to Yoav di-Capua, On both sides of the Mediterranean, Sartre, his intellectual circle, and their new Arab interlocutors were eager to demonstrate that, against the polarizing logic of the Cold War and the sociopolitical stagnation of Europe, decolonization could produce revolutionary societies that were as egalitarian, free, and patriotic as they were anti-imperialist and humanistic. For Europeans of the Left and colonized people of recently liberated domains, that, in a nutshell, was the promise of Third Worldism, and, far from being a provincial African, Asian, or Arab project, it was, in a variation on the old theme of colonial universality, a promising universal counter-project of its own. (di-Capua 2018, 2) Existentialism shaped the new idea of counter-universality, and further paved the way towards "Third Worldism" for both Western and non-Western intellectuals. What is this "Third Worldism"? It is merely the sublimation of the Cold War, the conflict of two ideological poles, the U.S. and the USSR in particular. Many thinkers of decolonization in the Third World, such as Franz Fanon inspired Sartre and his philosophical circle in France. Without the political movements in the former colonial countries, the mapping out of European thought would be unlike what we know today. However, it is undeniable that the non-European reception of existentialism was rooted in a deep longing for the European...

The Paranoid Style in Postcritique Frida Beckman (bio) Introduction From the 1990s and onwards, scattered signs of the decline of the heyday of theory in academic departments gradually formed enough coherence for some to call it a state of "post-theory," "after theory," "beyond theory," "death of theory," and various designations of that kind. Indeed, we are so beyond that decline now that even these "posts" and "afters" and "beyonds" and "deaths" seem rather unfashionable. In recent years, we have also, increasingly many argue, not just moved beyond theory but also beyond critique. There is a much longer history of the possibility and the crisis of critique, reaching back, ultimately to Kant and the dawn of modern critique, but also to Matthew Arnold, through Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. In this article, however, I will pay attention mostly to the joint effort of its most recent trend, which is essentially the pronounced need to revisit, reconsider, and perhaps also reject, modes of critique and ways of reading as they have been practiced, primarily in humanities departments, over the past few decades. The trend can be said to consist of two main strands. To begin with, we have what some see as a new crisis in critique as it has been identified, in quite different ways, by theorists such as Bruno Latour as well as by for example Antonio Negri and Jeffrey T. Nealon (and myself, see Beckman 2016). This crisis is characterized by a deep uncertainty about what use our critical tools can have in relation to the contemporary political landscape. In different ways, what is expressed is a sense in which critique has been consumed and perhaps even been put to work by the forces it was once trying to resist. The second strand of the current revaluation of critique has a stronger link to literary studies and includes focus on reading practices other than the kind of symptomatic- or suspicious reading associated with theory. This strand is often seen as kindled by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's revaluation of her own "paranoid" reading practices in the late 1990s. Since then, we have seen an intensifying inclination to propose "new" ways of reading. "The [End Page 37] way we read now," as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus called a special issue of Representations in 2009, are many, and apart from Best and Marcus' own "surface reading," other proposed ways of reading now include for example reparative reading, generous reading, and distant reading. To date, the most consistent reassessment of critique as a reading practice emerges from what Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker call "postcritique." Where the crisis in critique as represented by Latour may be seen as a crisis brought on by the suspicious linkage between theory and politics in the present, I would identify as a key characteristic of the postcritique Anker and Felski represent the very questioning of theory's impact on the world and, indeed, the questioning of the usefulness and applicability of such larger political engagements in the first place. What we see, then, in this burgeoning attention to the role of critique in recent years is on the one hand a concern about the unquestionably significant, but also decidedly detrimental, role that critique is seen to play in the hands of contemporary politics and culture and on the other, the sense in which critique has or should be made redundant, that is, that it is fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with the present. This article reads these two strands of the postcritical turn not just as an "ominous sign of defeatism" and as an example of "a failure of nerve on the part of intellectuals who are no longer prepared to embrace the role of gadflies and oppositional figures" (Felski and Anker 2017, 18) but as an even more worrying sign of the way in which neoliberal practices and control mechanisms are influencing critical thinking. As such, it will trace, not only how postcritique fails to escape the logic and pattern it aims to move away from, something Eric Hayot has already shown (2017, 287), but also how it gets caught up in a paranoid style that is particularly associated with structures of...

Multidimensionality:An Interview with Roderick A. Ferguson Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) and Roderick A. Ferguson Gender, race, sexuality, and class are often separated out as single issues. In his new book, One-Dimensional Queer (2019), Roderick Ferguson critiques this tendency, showing how the struggle for gender and sexual equality, for instance during the Stonewall rebellion, intersects with racial and class struggles. Taking the metaphor from Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, he argues for multidimensionality. Through his career, Ferguson has been a critic of the complications of identity. In Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004), he takes to task normative assumptions of sociology, as well as of identity politics, arguing that, "Instead of identity driving critical interventions, the heterogeneous formations that make up the social drive critical intervention." Alongside that work, he has also foregrounded diversity and identity in one of our chief institutions, the university. His influential The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012) critiques the ways that higher education has incorporated difference in largely one-dimensional ways. More recently in We Demand: The University and Student Protests (2017), he recounts a short history of multidimensional insurgent movements. In addition he co-edited Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (with Grace Kyungwon Hong; 2011) and Keywords for African American Studies (with Erica R. Edwards and Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar; 2018). Born in 1972 in rural Georgia, Ferguson studied sociology at Howard University (BA, 1994) and University of California-San Diego (MA, 1997; PhD, 2000). He was a professor of American studies at University of Minnesota from 2000-2014, moving to University of Illinois-Chicago as a professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies until 2019. He was also a visiting professor at Princeton in 2013 and the president of the American Studies Association in 2018. In 2019 he took a professorship in American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. This interview took place on 11 January 2020 in Seattle, WA, during the MLA Convention. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams and transcribed by Bethie Wang, an MA student at Carnegie Mellon University. [End Page 567] Jeffrey J. Williams: One classic distinction in modern criticism is between space and time critics. In trying to encapsulate your work, instead I'd say you're a dimensional critic, emphasizing the different dimensions of identity and other social categories. Your new book, One-Dimensional Queer, goes back to Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man and underscores the idea of dimensionality and sexuality, although your previous work also focuses on the dimensions or complications of diversity. How would you define yourself as a critic? Would you say you are a critic of dimensionality? Roderick A. Ferguson: That's not the category that I had thought of before, but part of what I have tried to do as a critic is to look at all the other compartments or dimensions that the reigning perspective doesn't highlight. I have oftentimes seen my role as a critic as aligned with activists, artists, and writers who insist on looking at those other dimensions. In a way, there is a tension between a political routine that focuses on one dimension, and what people are doing in their lives as activists or artists or just everyday people, who are trying to shed light on the multiple compartments and dimensions that make up the social world. JJW: In your new book, you conduct a short tour of the history of social movements of the 1960s, arguing that the tendency of gay liberation, for instance, was to incorporate several dimensions during its first moment, whether class and poverty, or other issues. But then as it progressed, it became narrowed to one dimension as it became absorbed into U.S. society—so the solution to gay politics is gay marriage, rather than being about equality and other radical possibilities. How did you come to that argument? RAF: That argument has a few origins. One is that I've always been interested in how a political imagination gets narrowed, especially if it starts out as something broader. Part of that...

Philosophy Between Land and Sea Brian O' Keeffe (bio) Peter Sloterdijk's In the World Interior of Capital challenges philosophy to propose a theory and a history of globalization. Why has philosophy not done so? Is it because that entails the monstrous self-confidence of "grand narrative"? Philosophy has been badgered into petits récits—so much the better, perhaps. For grands récits are tainted by tendention: too much overconfident teleology, too many overblown accounts of "progress" and "destiny." Postcolonial and feminist critiques have observed that the authors of such narratives are generally European, male, and white. Only a willfully obtuse writer would supply a grand narrative that ignored "the colonialist looting of the world" (Sloterdijk 2014, 4). Preferable, therefore, is a récit that would be "polyvalent, non-totalizing, and, above all, aware of its own perspectival conditionality" (2014, 4). There's nothing objectionable here, in Sloterdijk's view, except the assumption that grand narratives are incapable of similar polyvalence and self-awareness. Globalization past and present: this is the grand narrative Sloterdijk proposes. But it's also a narrative concerning the world, and so Sloterdijk gets down to brass tacks: the world is round. One chapter of the grand narrative therefore concerns orbs, balls, and circular geometries: "classical ontology was a sphereology" (9) because it conceived creation's perfection as a harmony between the vault of the heavens and the bow of the earth. To be is to dwell in perfect encirclement, girdled by sky, heaven, and earth. Another chapter concerns "terrestrial globalization realized practically through Christian-capitalist seafaring and politically implanted through the colonialism of the Old European nation-states" (9). Historians will observe that this story has already been written. But Sloterdijk's question is why philosophy hasn't surveyed that history. If matters began with Columbus' 1492 voyage to America, or with the age of European "Discovery," and "discovery" is "the central epistemological and political word of the modern age" (2014, 46), has philosophy ever thought seriously about discovery? "As far as we know," Sloterdijk writes, "a philosophically thought-out history of discoveries, terrestrial and maritime alike, has never been considered, let alone attempted or carried out" (53). I'm not sure that's quite true, but even if partly true, the reason is simply that the welter of concepts required for such a history would defeat the keenest philosophical [End Page 349] mind. One would need "distance, extension, externality, canopies, barbarians, becoming-image, density, one-sidedness, disinhibition, dispatchability, capture, inhibition, investment, capital, mapping, medium, mission, ecumene, risk, feedback, debt, obscurity, crime, traffic, interconnection, delusional system, world system, wishful thinking, cynicism" (53). Deleuze would probably eye that list with approval, but it's evidently a long list, and the difficulty for Sloterdijk himself is harnessing already-theorized terms like "debt" or "capital" to terms he has made his own, especially "canopies"—thoughts of sky-ceilings and world-plafonds abound in his Sphereologies trilogy. But if a philosophically thought-out history of terrestrial and maritime discoveries is at stake, the matter involves gaining conceptual purchase not just on "discovery" but also on "land" and "sea," especially "sea." For the capital moment occurred when sea voyages took primacy over trips taken on land. A "damp revolution" (42), as Sloterdijk fetchingly puts it. The oceans now served global affairs, and circumnavigation of the Waterworld was the name of the game. Land The objective of this essay is to assess Sloterdijk's challenge to philosophy, one made over a decade ago, but one which still has point, I think. The challenge is this: to offer what, to invoke Carl Schmitt, would be a "world-historical meditation" on land and sea (and, I suggest, islands as well). Imagine, first of all, a philosophy that formulated what Sloterdijk calls "the world-concept of the Modern Age" (2014, 88). A "concept" that concerns Discovery, but also the sea. Imagine, therefore, a Philosophy Department attuned to the sea, contemplating docks and stevedores. It would have constituted itself "as a swimming faculty, or at least as the port authority of Old Europe" (88). Nice. The Philosophy Department as the Department for Maritime Affairs; philosophers as harbor masters and ship-chandlers; Kant and Hegel...

Out of Control Rita Raley (bio) In each apparatus we have to entangle the lines of the recent past and those of the near future: that which belongs to the archive and that which belongs to the present; that which belongs to history and that which belongs to the process of becoming; that which belongs to the analytic and that which belongs to the diagnostic. —Gilles Deleuze, "What Is a Dispositif?" (1992, 164) What if we were to allow for the concept of control—the focus of this special issue—as descriptive, one that designates a logic and regime of power that emerges in the wake of, or in tandem with, the entire apparatus of mid-twentieth century research in the computational, psychological, and biological sciences, and then ask, does control describe our moment? Or are we now living through a transition into a new episteme, a new kind of society, with its own economic and technological arrangements? What would such a proposition allow us to see and what forms of action would it both enable and demand? ONE Everything, everywhere, seems to be out of control.1 We do not need the polar bears, the doomsday preppers, or the global political news to precipitate worry that the collapse, in Jared Diamond's terms, is less cautionary tale than credible assumption. But these things function as signs of crisis nonetheless and help to set the zeitgeist mood of apocalypse and doom that, even if collectively unconscious, has been palpable. The world is always ending, yet something feels different as we enter the third decade of the new millennium. [End Page 163] Globalization has not worked out—this would be the colloquial form of the narrative that seeks to explain the virulent resurgence of nationalist populisms that have manifested in the rise of authoritarian leaders from Victor Orbán to Jair Bolsonaro, with of course the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Brexit vote in between. More precise academic explanations might situate the roots of our malaise and even the seeds of our eventual destruction with both the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, the knock-on effects of which have been so many and various as to appear overwhelmingly incalculable. Regardless, we are left with the felt sense of socio-political disorder, the feeling that no one, or perhaps a shadowy and evil someone, is at the helm, steering us all toward uncertain but surely catastrophic ends—the feeling that institutional foundations are crumbling and the ground is giving way beneath our feet, or perhaps lost to others making a territorial claim. All of this in a moment when perhaps what feels most to be out of control is the literal ground, the planet. Whole swaths of my town, and part of my university, will most probably be underwater in my lifetime; perhaps yours will be as well or perhaps you will be in a newly formed tundra or moving away from an uninhabitable desert. What lies behind such climactic and geologic transformations of course will be centuries of extractive, destructive, and consumptive human behavior, culminating in the loss of plant and animal species and the pushing of vulnerable populations to the brink of annihilation. Observing the belated turn from circumspection and reticence to outright panic in the language used by climate scientists, David Wallace-Wells concludes with some relief that "It is O.K., finally, to freak out. Even reasonable…[because] we're at a point where alarmism and catastrophic thinking are valuable" (2019, n.p.). Apprehending the end, as is said, concentrates the mind—and it may be precisely what is needed to mobilize people to take meaningful action to try to stop the runaway train that serves as the all-purpose metaphor for out-of-control environmental processes, financial systems, and political institutions alike. But here the indeterminate ending of Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013) is instructive: even if one can imagine a revolutionary movement to derail the train and liberate the indentured workers who keep it running, what awaits upon your eventual escape to the outside is a probably-hungry polar bear, which means either that...

Open Endings:The Eastern North Pacific Gray Whale Unusual Mortality Event, 1999-20001 Sophia M. A. Nicolov (bio) Unlike anything in the recorded history, between 1999 and 2000, 651 eastern North Pacific gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) were discovered stranded on the west coasts of Mexico, the USA and Canada (see table 1). The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) of the U.S. government body, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), consulted the official Working Group on Marine Mammal Unusual Mortality Events, which officially declared this surge in strandings an "unusual mortality event" (UME) (Gulland et al. 2005, 1, 2). A UME is defined under the 1972 U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act as "a stranding that is unexpected, involves a significant die-off of any marine mammal population, and demands immediate response" (Marine Mammal Commission 2015a, 103). The formal designation emphasized the anomalous nature of this incident and the importance of scientific investigation. Specialists proposed that the strandings were part of a worrying overall decline in the population of around a third; the species was believed to have only just recovered to pre-whaling numbers. Having reached a peak population of approximately 26,635 in 1997/8, by 2002 this had dropped to an estimated 17,500 (McLean 2002). Although the strandings represented a small percentage of the die-off, these signs of serious trouble triggered alarm amongst the scientific community and wider society in these Pacific coastal regions (Gulland et al. 2005, 2; Hogan and Peterson 2003, 89, 90-91, 256). Taking an interdisciplinary approach that synthesises perspectives from the environmental humanities with scientific research, this article investigates the complex of scientific and wider societal responses to and understandings of the 1999-2000 gray whale UME. It considers the ways in which both scientists and lay people have sought answers to the mortality event as well as what the strandings reveal about the species, cause (or causes) of death [End Page 15] and the impact of human activity on cetaceans and the ocean more widely. As Latour contends, there are phenomena that are "too social and too narrated to be truly natural"; human responses to whale strandings exemplify this "double construction" (1993, 6). Creative responses to the gray whale and also the UME will be analysed, highlighting the ways in which their observations are informed by and diverge from contemporary scientific information. The two key texts are Dick Russell's Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia (2001) and Sightings: The Gray Whales' Mysterious Journey (2003) by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson, both written at the time of the mortality event between 1999 and 2000. By taking a cross-disciplinary approach, I address the ways in which scientific knowledge changes over time and what the implications of this might be for the management of marine mammal populations. Moreover, I consider what this shifting knowledge might mean for more popular understandings and, in turn, the ways wider societal perceptions are reflected in specialist research and co-shape representations of gray whales. Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Total gray whale stranding reports, 1995-2002 (table adapted from Gulland et al. 2005, 8-29) From Whaling to Whale-hugging Travelling up to 12,000 miles on a round trip from the winter birthing lagoons of Mexico's Baja California Sur to their Arctic feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi seas, gray whales have one of the longest migrations of any mammal. On their journey they pass California, Oregon and Washington, travel along the west coasts of Vancouver Island, Canada, and Alaska, and eventually cross through the Unimak Pass to reach their summer grounds. Along this expansive coastline, the gray whale was twice hunted to the point of extinction, first in the mid-nineteenth-century and later in the early twentieth century (Ellis 1991, 242-244; Dedina 2000, 19-24, 26). The first period of whaling, which was dominated by the endeavours of notorious whaler cum naturalist, Charles Melville Scammon, resulted in this species' almost total decimation. It is the most infamous, focusing as it did on the Mexican birthing lagoons where the gray whales come to give birth, nurse their young [End Page...

The Sight of Memory:Bloom's "Otherseeing" in Possessed by Memory Gina Masucci Mackenzie (bio) Harold Bloom, Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019). xx + 508 pp. Possessed by Memory is Bloom's vision. It is his attempt to see his own life, through the poetry he has committed to his memory and which he uses to envision his own life. For Bloom, vision is what a person has when that person stops being afraid of those who have come before us. It is the clarity we have when we have let go of the anxiety of our influences. In this most recent text, Bloom only briefly nods to his most famous, and only somewhat ironic work, but no reader can help but no consider it. As critics, we are all under the anxiety of his influence. He is one of the last in the lineage of outstanding post-WW II literary theorists, who vast knowledge is only matched by their academic inquiry and innovation. This current generation of critics, my generation of critics, is frequently, I would surmise, stunted in growth by the anxiety we feel faced with the greatness of that critical greatest generation. Instead, we fly to the default position of "down with theory." I cannot help but wonder if so many of us proclaim the death of theory because we are not able to produce our own. In Possessed by Memory, Bloom, even as he ruminates and revisits, sets forth a new pattern of literary analysis. His short bursts of insight are analysis for the digital age. Even though the text is meaty, its division into small bites makes it palatable for readers, who are used to texts and tweets, not manuscripts. His lengthy citations of primary sources makes the contact with the poetry unmediated. The greatest poets of the Western canon get to speak for themselves, punctuated with tender but pointed analysis. The histories of faiths, traditions and literatures gives the reader access to Bloom's vision of the world. Bloom delineates the different ways of seeing in "Self-Otherseeing and the Shakespearean Sublime." He writes, There are four aspects to self-otherseeing: [End Page 329] 1. To see one's own other selves 2. To see (by glimpses) the shattering reality of others and of otherness 3. To see nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. 4. To see everything that could be there and the plentitude that already is While within the chapter this list directly applies to Bastard Faulconbridge, a figure in The Life and Death of King John, self-otherseeing is much more than a literary trope. It is Bloom's four pronged definition of vision and it is the super-structure of Possessed by Memory. "To see one's own other selves" is to understand that in each of us lives an other, a self either projected outward for society to see, or projected inward other to be secretly nurtured. Bloom uses Shakespeare and his contemporaries to illustrate this concept. Writing about the Bastard, Bloom explains, "He is aware of Hubert's otherness, despite the phantasmagoria of battle, yet in seeing what endures of the selfsame (as Shakespeare named individual identity) the Bastard wonders a little at his own strong personality and its survival of all the changes attendant upon war. The first of Shakespeare's self-stagers, the Bastard suddenly apprehends that the flux of action threatens him, the only joyous and exuberant spirit in all of King John" (88). Self-staging is an important concept for Shakespeare and Bloom has spent much of his career tracing the lineage of those larger than life figures: the Bastard, Mercutio, and Falstaff. In Possessed by Memory, Bloom is quietly asserting himself into that lineage. By analyzing the works that he has committed to his critical memory, Bloom is projecting those works outward as his other selves. Bloom has spent his entire life and career grappling with some of the greatest works of poetry from the Western canon. Through his work, they have become a part of him, but they are not him. He certainly did not author the poetry, just some...

The Sea as Archive:Impressions of Qui Se Souvient De La Mer Donna Honarpisheh (bio) The sea has many voices,Many gods and many voices. —T. S. Eliot (2014, 36) Navigating the green splendor of the sea—whether in melancholic transatlantic crossings or glorious regattas or traditional races of yoles and gommiers—still brings to mind, coming to light like seaweed, these lowest depths, these deeps, with their punctuation of scarcely corroded balls and chains. In actual fact the abyss is a tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green. —Édouard Glissant (2009) In the postface to his 1962 novel, Qui Se Souvient De La Mer (Who Remembers The Sea), Mohammad Dib discusses the formal structure through which he decides to narrate the experience of the Algerian war. In these pages, Dib emphasizes the significance of formal innovation in the rendering of the violence that surrounded him, so much so that he gravitated towards a poetics that reflected a marked departure from his typical realist style of writing. Without prescribing an alternative literary form prior to the act of writing, Dib knew that the linearity and clearly delineated structures of the realist form could not adequately give life to the sensory and atmospheric excesses that permeated the air of the time. Reflecting on the phantasmagoric style of his text, Dib recounts a sudden consciousness of the "caractère illimité" ("limitless character") of horror in his experience of the war. He describes a horror that felt "unimaginable" even as he knew it would erode into the banality that dissolves the experience of crisis into chronicle. The disorienting terror would quickly fall flat in both collective and state memory to become little more than a tale of the expected violences of war, independence struggle, and the formation of national sovereignty. Dib avoids telling this story in a way that explicitly manifests the supposed origins of misery via [End Page 91] the binary language of colonizer and colonized and its subsequent iteration within the linear formation of national histories. Rather than falling into the trap of setting aside the past as the past, covering over traces of pain, and further eroding the psychic residues of this violence, Dib's poetic gesture attends to the nameless and forgotten elements of History, the residual, the marks, and the cries. The non-categorical formal expression of the characters and events invites a reading practice that strays from overdetermination to instead stay with and attend to the persevering elemental forces that shape experience. The novel's happenings are rendered through elemental forces, with the sea serving as a central, but fading character. The atmospheric presence of the sea is abstracted from concrete geographic locality and yet still serves as an idea, memory, possibility, and material force whose movements permeate the occurences of the land. The novel's formal abstraction ruptures the violence of colonization and the transition to independence from their historical particularity without compromising the experience of violence that exists within these paralleled temporal and imagined constructions of the world. Dib's abstraction does not evade the political but suggests that attuning our reading of historical violence to the forgotten gestures, and further, to the atmospheric power of the sea and the sediments permits a reading of violence that exposes its continuity, psychic and material. Thus, Dib suggests, the form of our remembrance1 ("our" signifying the always fractured collective unconscious of the colonized psyche), particularly our attunement to the residual temporality of the unconscious, is integral to the prospect of historical consciousness and futurity. Dib worried this species of horror, repeated, was defining the 20th century, as "cette immense nuée démoniaque qui plane au-dessus du monde depuis tant d'années" ("that great demonic cloud that has for so many years been floating above the world") and that threatened to be absorbed into "l'enfer de banalité dont l'horreur a su s'entourer en nous entourer?" ("that hell of banality2 with which the horror has managed to surround itself and to surround us...

The Book History of Theory Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) The rise of theory is a familiar story, and most histories account for particular theories and theorists, for instance Derrida critiquing the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss or Saussure on the way to inventing deconstruction. That is, most histories see theory as a chain of ideas. The commonplace figure of "the conversation" tacitly frames it that way—it is a dialogue of what's said, of statements and arguments. It is of course that, but it is not only that; the conversational model largely abstracts theory from its institutional and historical situations. Those situations might loom in the background—we often hear that the sixties provided the air that made contemporary theory breath—but they seem atmospheric. One way we might account for the institutional situation of theory is through its book history, and I think we need to develop this dimension of critical history. The books and journals and other publishing apparatuses of theory form the material channels that generate criticism, and they provide a concrete way to look at the operation of the institution and how it bounds the field and makes the rules for criticism in its time. Institutions sometimes seem to designate large impersonal forces or constraining disciplinary ogres, but like the rules of a game, they both create the conditions for, as well as limit the possibilities of, criticism. There is relatively little scholarly work on the book history of theory. As a point of contrast, there is a great deal of scholarship on the literary magazines and journals of modernism, and by extension there is a good deal of scholarship on the journals of the New Criticism.1 But there is little on what I have called the theory journal, even though the brief period between 1969 and 1979 saw more than thirty new such journals founded, as well other print channels of theory. One avenue of research might be looking at publishers. For instance, it would be telling to look in more depth at presses like Routledge, Minnesota, and Duke and the shift in academic publishing in the U.S. during the 1980s [End Page 443] and 90s.2 For instance, the rise of theory was not only recorded by Routledge, but Routledge spurred and shaped it, especially after the founding of its New York office in the late 1980s.3 I got a firsthand glimpse of its operation in 1989-90, when I was in the limbo between PhD and a proper academic job and worked there as an editorial assistant. I saw Bill Germano, the editorial director and commissioning editor for literature, and the other editors at work, and the parade of books they published around that time, such as H. Aram Veeser's collection The New Historicism (1989), Donna Haraway's Primate Visions (1989), Andrew Ross' No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989), Diana Fuss' Essentially Speaking (1989), Gayatri Spivak's The Postcolonial Critic (1990), Stephen Greenblatt's Learning to Curse (1990), and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990).4 While he doesn't appear in most histories, I think Germano had a significant hand in making theory what it became and overseeing its development as a publishing category. I'd first heard of Germano when I was in graduate school and starting to read the main texts of deconstruction. It was the moment just after de Man's death, after he had just received a front-page obituary in the New York Times (1983) but before the front-page revelations of his journalism from World War II and two anti-Semitic articles (1987), and his influence was probably at its peak. In September 1985 there was a major memorial conference at CUNY, and in the lobby of the lecture hall was a table with stacks of de Man's recently published The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984). De Man had published only two books during his lifetime so the volume was something of an event, and perusing the preface I was intrigued to read that, according to de Man, the volume owed its existence to Germano, who was a young editor at Columbia University Press and had suggested it (1984, vii...