The friend-enemy distinction is one of the most influential concepts of modern politics. It dominates both theory and practice in international relations and conditions the imaginations of political leaders and those they lead. For realists, friend-enemy manifests an individual disposition writ large, as they project a Hobbesian conception of the state of nature onto an international level. War, for Hobbes, “is first and foremost a de facto condition of human nature,” and is a result of “the passions of human beings” (Thivet 2008, 702, 705). For realists, “states are motivated by a survival instinct…” (Maoz, Terris, Kuperman, and Talmud 2007, 101). Schmitt’s importance, in this context, is as “the forerunner of political realism, as exemplified in the work of Hans Morgenthau, E. H. Carr and Hedley Bull” (Chandler 2008, 45). Indeed, unlike the approach of the Greeks of the classical era, who “did not place friendship directly into a relation to war…[,] the modern notion of ‘the friend’ already includes this relation in the opposition between ‘the friend’ and ‘the enemy’, as Schmitt has already argued in The Concept of the Political…” (Lambert 2008, 44).

Reviewed by: The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century Horace L. Fairlamb Jerrold Seigel. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 732 pp. Seigel’s monumental history of an idea assimilates a daunting range of modern European thinking about the self. What daunts is not only the protean nature of the self and the list of notables consulted, but also the various types of writing that one must account for, including Hume’s epistemology, Smith’s political economy, Rousseau’s novels, Mill’s autobiography, Hegel’s theology, Freud’s psychology, and Derrida’s écriture. Proving himself an exceptional interdisciplinarian, Seigel distills an enormous range of thinking while providing a clear and incisive commentary on these and many other key thinkers. Seigel’s work modestly avoids claiming to provide an ultimate theory of the self, yet it does provide a powerful conceptual grid that uses corporeality, sociality, and reflectivity as its three dimensions, whose interrelations allow Seigel a quite nuanced analysis of his authors. Beyond its analytical utility, however, the grid implies the robust theoretical conclusion that the self resists reduction to any single element—such as reflection, instinct, sympathy, social construction, or [End Page 377] language—as some theorists have sometimes (perhaps hyperbolically) suggested. The richness of Seigel’s framework, as he repeatedly shows, gives him notable critical leverage. If not a finished theory of the self, Idea establishes the elements for which an adequate theory of the self must be accountable. Primarily, Idea is a work of intellectual history including discussions of Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, Condillac, Diderot, Rousseau, Maine de Biran, Constant, Kant, Herder, Humboldt, Goethe, Fichte, Novalis, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Mill, Durkheim, Mallarmé, Janet, Fouille, Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. Merely to list these names, however, fails to convey Seigel’s judicious four-fold integration of the authors’ thoughts, the influence of their historical and intellectual circumstances, the insights of their commentators, and their place in his analytic framework. The result is a multilayered, intertextual genealogy of a central modern theme. Though some have judged that the history of ideas has been called into question by more fluid genealogies of epistemes and discursive practices, Seigel’s history shows that evolving ideas may be usefully mapped with enough of the right landmarks. The centrality of his theme allows Seigel’s an extraordinarily inclusive focus, so much so that most chapters provide general introductions to the authors in question. The chapter on Adam Smith, for example, not only presents Smith’s moral philosophy in detail, but also links Smith’s notion of virtue to the idea of a commercial world in which people must interact favorably—as if guided by an invisible hand—with strangers as well as friends. Thus, commerce cultivates civic virtues. But as Seigel shows, Smith was no business-class cheerleader, having had few illusions about the limits of market discipline. While praising the invisible hand’s moralizing influence among strangers, Smith condemned the business class for exploiting their own laborers by conspiring to keep wages artificially low. The chapter on Rousseau, by contrast, draws heavily from the novels, which allows illuminating links between Rousseau’s life and his imagination of virtue. The chapters on the German idealists are especially useful for those seeking from Kant more than his epistemology in its essentials. Examining the development of idealism through Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger, Seigel illuminates a philosophical legacy whose repercussions reached from modern aesthetics to modern theology. For contemporary readers, Seigel’s concise weaving of presentation and analysis is no less effective than in the final chapter on Foucault and Derrida. Seigel approaches Foucault through such lesser-known influences as Bataille and Roussel, revealing personal concerns with selfhood and death that are less obvious in the influential but abstract theoretical studies. Moreover, Seigel raises much needed questions [End Page 378] about whether Foucault’s and Derrida’s contributions to the death of the self are as devastating as some have said. In particular, Seigel suggestively juxtaposes Foucault’s switch from psychological determinism to self-invention with his late shift toward liberal views he...

The Seven Faces of Anonymity in Academe Lynn Z. Bloom (bio) I am anonymous. I am ubiquitous. And, not incidentally, I am invisible, the color of country air, the color of mountain water running over rocks. But beware; my transparency is deceptive, as is my appearance of virtue, rectitude, impartiality. You may think you know me, but you don’t. I have many faces—that of the tenured professor, job candidate, competitor, the disembodied voice of institutional history, contingent labor, support personnel, students. I have no face at all. You can write onto this tabula rasa the visage of your best friend, your archrival, your nemesis, your mother. But all that you will see is my mortarboard, slanting forward to cover my eyes, shading my countenance so that all that is visible, the tip of my chin and the occasional flicker of a smile, the smile of equivocation. Face #1: I am a gatekeeper. As a tenured professor, particularly a full professor, especially when designated by the alias of an endowed chair, I hold the keys to the kingdoms of publication and prestige. By virtue of my expertise—or so it is believed—in your field of inquiry, I judge your work early, and I judge it often. I review article submissions for refereed journals, book prospectuses and manuscripts submitted to university presses, grant proposals and other requests for funding. I am always fair, ever disinterested; my own research, reputation, funding will in no way be affected by your fate. The mantra of my rigor is “Prove it.” I am a demon on originality, knowledge of the field, research method, costs, elegance, and prose style. My commentary is very specific. Perhaps one in a hundred manuscripts or proposals will electrify me, so fresh, so smart, so well written, so risky—hotshots and daredevils please apply. “Hats off,” I say—the only time I ever remove my chapeau, and that only in private. “Publish this, fund this! Immediately!” If I consider other work meritorious and therefore salvageable, I provide very specific information on what to do to revise and resubmit. If it’s ho-hum, a warmed-over course paper, or a desperate [End Page 43] dissertation chapter, I will try to educate you. And you had better Listen Up; this commentary is For Your Own Good. However, if you as an author nouveau have submitted your Voyage of Great Discovery (even one more sophisticated than “Wow! Shakespeare was a Great Author!”), unless you are a latter-day Darwin, you may expect me to consider your maiden sojourn just another worn path leading Once More to the Lake in which I swim every day. I do not extend a life preserver. I never sign my reviews. This is not a dialogue. I do not want to know your rebuttal, though I am willing to read a thoroughgoing, thoughtful revision. I do not want to know the impact of my review on your life, professional or personal, or on your feelings. I am providing a Service to the Profession, even if that means Keeping You Out. I review manuscripts for all the major journals and presses in the field. If I reject your submission at the top, odds are that the editors down the line, around the world, will also send the same work to me. Although, in fairness to you, I seek to recuse myself from multiple negative evaluations of the same work, editors always ask why I am doing so, and I tell them. I can envision your paper, your proposal descending into the circles of reviewer hell, bumping up against the barrier of my review time after time after time. It is not a pretty sight, but that is a problem over which I have no control, for I’m the expert and you, alas, are not. As an anonymous contributor, you are allegedly invisible to me, though on occasion I can discern your visage peeping through your prose. I believe I can tell your gender, and your sexual orientation, occasionally your class or ethnicity. I also believe that I am sufficiently unbiased so that this understanding—even if I am in error—will not influence my decision. However...

“The Shibboleth of Liberation”: Calinescu’s Postmodernism Marjorie Perloff (bio) The first issue of William V. Spanos’ journal boundary 2 (1972–73)published two ground-breaking essays distinguishing between modernism and postmodernism—David Antin’s often reprinted “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry” and Charles Altieri’s “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics.” Both made the case for a “new” poetics substantively different from the neo-modernist work of poets like Robert Lowell and W. D. Snodgrass, Randall Jarrell and John Berryman. Altieri’s essay suggests that the generically symbolist mode characteristic of modernism—the mode whereby a given image or cluster of images in a poem pointed to something outside itself in the “real” world, was being replaced by a poetics of presence, of immanence, the old relationship between signifier and signified having broken down. I myself was very taken with this argument. Antin demonstrated with great wit and energy that Lowell’s “history collage” poems were attenuated versions of T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s collage—a collage that, in the post-World War II era, had lost its original impetus. La Condition postmoderne, as Jean-François Lyotard called it in his 1979 book by that name, seemed to describe perfectly the loss of faith in some form of essentialist truth and the decline of the great metanarratives of modernity. In the various art forms of the seventies and eighties, “postmodern” became the adjective of choice to define the New. I was writing, in those days, about “postmodern lyric” from Zukofsky and Oppen, to O’Hara and Ashbery, to the Language poets, the antagonist being, not the great modernists, but the Establishment poets of mid-century who followed in their wake—poets who wrote as if the vast upheavals that characterized the early twentieth century had never occurred. In the seventies, Ihab Hassan was producing his famous tables juxta-posing a modernist column to a postmodernist one: the City versus the Global Village, Closure versus Openness, Transcendence versus Immanence, Hierarchy versus Anarchy, and so on. Stravinsky was a modernist, Cage a postmodernist; Bauhaus aesthetic was modernist, Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas (1977) postmodernist. Thinking in postmodernist terms allowed for a seemingly “new” radical art. Ironically, however, David Antin’s great exemplar of “postmodernist” aesthetic was not a contemporary like Jackson Mac [End Page 277] Low or Jerome Rothenberg, but Gertrude Stein, whose Tender Buttons, which Antin discusses in his essay, dates from 1914. Altieri’s model twentieth-century poet was and remains Wallace Stevens, and I myself traced what I called “the poetics of indeterminacy” (originally I called it “the other tradition”) back to Rimbaud, Pound, and Stein. Indeed, from the vantage point of 2010, what so many of us called “postmodernism” was really the “other” modernism—and not wholly other either, since, as the decades have turned, Baudelaire seems more “modern” (and hence postmodern?) than ever, and Eliot, the whipping boy of the early postmodernists, who saw him as an elitist, conservative, and retro poet, is once again very popular. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land: has the modernism of these poems been surpassed in the English-speaking world? And the John Ashbery I had somewhat glibly placed among the poets of the “other tradition” had obviously learned a great deal from Eliot. It was one of the great merits of Matei Calinescu’s Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, and Kitsch (1977), the seminal study to which, for the second edition (1987), the author somewhat reluctantly added a post-chapter called “On postmodernism,” to have understood, all along, that “Postmodernism” was a problematic term. Or rather—and here Calinescu was especially prescient—he understood that there are “two conflicting and interdependent modernities—one socially progressive, rationalistic, competitive, technological; the other culturally critical and self-critical, bent on demystifying the basic values of the first” (Faces 265). Self-declared postmodernists set themselves against the “autonomy” of the second, not really taking into account their own relationship to the first. Thus, as Calinescu says with fine irony, Such an optimistic apocalyptic interpretation of the term postmodern [as Charles Olson’s...

Drive apartment near Columbia University. Reprinted in this little book, they were quite wide ranging in topic, moving from Said's youth prior to coming to the US, through his abiding interest in music and literature, to his engagement with the question of Palestine (his relation to the PLO and Yasser Arafat), the reception of his work, his idea of the relationship between the intellectual and politics, his view of things American, and, at the end, his identity as an exile. As usual, Said in these conversations is remarkably rational yet passionate in his responses, enormously erudite, yet lucid, a sophisticated intellectual who nevertheless comes across as a profoundly humanhumane and finitehuman being. More specifically, Said is consistently contrapuntal in his readings of the hegemonic truths of the issues he discusses with his interlocutor, whether these pertain to Israel's monolithic representation of the Palestinians or the Arab world's monolithic representation of the Western world. He is always, out of principle, evokingbringing to center stage that which the hegemonic discourse leaves unsaid (silences) or relegates to the irrelevant margins, thus always preserving the question from the brutal answerers. This, however, without forgetting, as is the wont of liberals or pragmatists, that opposing ideas or positions in this world are not equal, that some are infused with power and some are not.

Leonce Perret's 1912 film Le mystere des Roches de Kador presents one of the most beautiful shots in the early history of cinema: the female protagonist, Suzanne, shrinks away from a white screen filled with light in front of her and eventually faints (see Figure 1). In the film's story, Suzanne has fallen into an amnesic and catatonic state due to a traumatic experience of a shooting incident taken place at a rough seashore, where Suzanne's cousin who is jealously in love with her has attempted to shoot her fiance. She is treated by a Professor Williams with a new cinematographic method in psychotherapy, which consists of restaging and recording the traumatic event and then showing the film to the patient. The scene in question displays the screening of the film, after which Suzanne becomes cured and regains her capacity to speak, recollect, and act. Most importantly, Suzanne recovers her of language, a faculty that in the history of Western thought has been approached as that of articulate and meaningful speech essentially characterizing the living being that has logos (to zoon logon ekhon) (e.g., Aristotle 2002, De Interpretatione 16a27-29).

Reviewed by: Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil Carol A. Senf Peter Day, ed. Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. 243 pp. This anthology has quite a remarkable pedigree, its parents being At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries publications (working in partnership with Rodopi) and the research project Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (www.wickedness.net). Indeed, it is the twenty-eighth volume in the interdisciplinary At the Boundaries series which, according to its website, "seeks to encourage and promote cutting edge inter-disciplinary and multidisciplinary projects and inquiry" and bring together people "from differing contexts, disciplines, professions, and vocations" to encourage "conversations that are innovative, imaginative, and creatively interactive." Wickedness.net has a similar interdisciplinary aim to "foster a global dialogue capable of building a multi-layered picture of the problems and possible solutions encountered when dealing with evil and wickedness." While children sometimes disappoint their parents, Vampires has succeeded in meeting both parents' interdisciplinary goals. Definitely interdisciplinary, it includes essays on important vampires in literature, such as Dracula and Carmilla , as well as material from linguistics, history, biology, psychology, and contemporary popular culture. The volume is divided into two parts. Of these, part 1 focuses on the "Legend of the Vampire" and includes material on literature, the historical context, and fin de siecle art (primarily the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists). There are few surprises here. One would expect at least one essay on Stoker's Dracula, and Elizabeth Miller provides a careful overview of Stoker's sources. Ever scrupulous, Miller reminds readers that Stoker never went to Transylvania and that it is important to know the "general information about vampires that would have been available in the late nineteenth century" (3). Miller goes over material that she has covered elsewhere, but Day is right to use this careful essay as the opening essay. There are few surprises in any of the other essays in this section though all of the writers have been careful to read and integrate existing research on their topic, whatever it may be. People who have already read widely on the subject of the undead may be a bit surprised to find so little that is truly "cutting edge." The single quirky exception, "Vampire Dogs and Marsupial Hyenas: Fear, Myth, and the Tasmanian Tiger's Extinction" by Phil Bagust, introduces what to me is a genuinely new aspect of the vampire as a cultural icon. Indeed, Bagust demonstrates that the colonial landowners in New Zealand used vampire and werewolf superstitions to "ferment a long campaign of bloody persecution against the Thylacine" with the predictable result that the creature is now biologically extinct (95). Like the vampire of legend, however, it has "a strange 'second life' as a 'mystery animal'" (94). Not only do individuals occasionally claim that they have sighted the Tasmanian Tiger, but it has become an important symbol, appearing in tourist literature and on that state's license plates. Bagust's essay touches on everything from the cloning of extinct animals to people's continued need for mystery. A novel and thought-provoking essay, it prompted me to think about ways that various cultures have adapted traditional beliefs. If part 1 offers much in the way of solid summary but little that is new and revolutionary, part 2, Vampires for the Modern Mind, is more likely to inspire [End Page 400] conversations in new, interdisciplinary areas. Although I would have expected to read at least one essay on both the novels of Anne Rice and on vampires in film, Stacey Abbot's essay, "Embracing the Metropolis: Urban Vampires in American Cinema of the 1980s and 90s," offers new insights into the differences in the vampires who occupy two entirely different urban areas, New York and Los Angeles. This brief summary does not do justice to the essay that also touches on race, gender, and the differences between the ways the vampire is depicted in Hollywood films versus independent films. I also learned about contemporary culture from "Vampire Subcultures" in which Meg Barker demonstrates how people today have adopted characteristics of the traditional vampire to explain their own psychological needs...

Reviewed by: Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture Andrew Baerg Lisa Gitelman. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. 221 pp. What does it mean for this review to appear in both print and in digital media? What role does the medium play in the experience of what follows? How does the newsprint or hard drive on which this content has been inscribed shape the interpretation of the text as a document? Lisa Gitelman's Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture considers these kinds of queries in examining how new media "are experienced and studied as historical subjects" (1). Her answers provide a way into conceptualizing both new media and the practice of media history. In her introduction, she notes the difficult task of doing media history without resorting to an essentializing that effectively accords media their own kind of power or conflates them with technologies. This project is further complicated by the fact that media are always already representing and constituting what counts as adequate representation as they mediate, especially with reference to the representation of the past. As such, media function in a kind of reflexive manner in both representing the past and being materially imbricated in an encounter with it. Gitelman argues that studying the emergence of a new medium enables insight into the ways in which its representation functions are constructed. However, media can also be taken for granted once their representation functions have been naturalized. Attending to media as historical subjects renders visible this naturalized transparency and raises the kinds of questions Gitelman explores here. Given that Gitelman defines media "as socially realized structures of communication," she grapples with questions of agency, both individual and technological (7). With questions of agency come questions of potential determinism. Gitelman attempts to avoid these implicitly technological determinist positions by situating the newness of media within their respective social and economic contexts while emphasizing how the materiality of media can shape these communicatively constituted contexts. For her, "the social experience of meaning [is] a material fact" (18). Her specific focus invokes the narrow chronological periods in which the inscription media of the phonograph (in part 1) and the Internet (in part 2) arise, those media whose representation is both material and semiotic. Chapters 1 and 2 provide the clearest defense of her thesis in examining how the inscriptions of the phonograph and their subsequent circulation shaped the construction of media publics and public life. Gitelman's exploration of how the first phonographs' inscriptions of sound on foil occurring at interactive phonograph exhibitions offers insight into how publics understood speech inscribed on paper. In addressing how the materiality of the medium would guide its meaning, Gitelman explains how the inscribed tinfoil that audiences [End Page 383] would take home with them from these exhibitions served as the physical symbol of an authentic shared and culturally legitimated public experience in a manner different from print. Gitelman suggests these exhibitions furthered a feeling of national consensus as participating audiences became part of a technologically advanced, recorded public comprised of anonymous and distant members. Chapter 2 addresses how the phonograph was appropriated in the social and economic context of American culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Where Edison initially intended the phonograph to serve as a dictation recording device, Gitelman explores how it came to be appropriated more popularly as a musical amusement machine. Gitelman's definition of medium grounds her methodology as she applies the idea that media technologies ought to be approached from the perspective of their users and not exclusively that of their producers. Those readers familiar with media studies scholarship may note some similarities in this approach to the audience-centric analyses offered by Janice Radway in her discussion of romance novel readers and Ien Ang in her study of Dallas fans. In avoiding a political economic perspective, Gitelman advocates the importance of seeing a new medium's function defined by its users rather than by those prescribing its specific use or even by the medium itself. In making this move, Gitelman successfully dislodges what she deems to be the...