boundary 2 recent issues

The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin's Dialectical Image

Friedlander, E. — 2008-10-31

The present essay sketches in broad outlines the philosophical armature of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project by analyzing the central theoretical notion in that incomplete manuscript of his: the dialectical image. So as to bring out the uniqueness of Benjamin's use of image, I consider his account of its relation to language. Rather than setting an opposition between language and image, I argue that language is the medium in which the dialectical image can emerge at all. I further think of the emerging image as characterizing the mode of presentation of the material of the investigation as a whole, or in other words, the dialectical image is what constitutes the presentation of what Kant calls an idea with the material of experience. The image so revealed is not a representation of reality, but rather Benjamin thinks of it, after Goethe, as an archetype, a standard for judging the significance of historical reality. The possibility of recognizing the image of the past further depends on being attuned to a peculiar temporality, a movement within the medium of memory in which the meaning of the past is realized in the present. Finally, as I argue, the past emerges in authentic historical remembrance initially in a distorted form which Benjamin compares to the form of meaning in dream experience. The recognition of the image must then be understood as the traversal of that space of semblance which brings out its truth, as the awakening from the dream.

Homo profanus: Giorgio Agamben's Profane Philosophy

de la Durantaye, L. — 2008-10-31

Giorgio Agamben's work first achieved international recognition—and notoriety—through his study of the sacred in Homo Sacer. This recognition and notoriety grew with the subsequent installments in this still ongoing series, Remnants of Auschwitz (Homo Sacer III), State of Exception (Homo Sacer II.1), and The Kingdom and the Glory (Homo Sacer II.2). Agamben's recent work, Profanations, is, however, not a part of that series. As its title indicates, it turns from the sacred to the profane, and in so doing reveals the most profound intentions of Agamben's philosophy. Agamben's naming the profane rather than the sacred in the title of this work does not, however, represent a turn to a new topic. Beginning with his first books in the 1970s, he has shown himself deeply interested in the idea of the profane, in significant part through terms and concepts employed by Walter Benjamin such as "profane illumination" and "the order of the profane." In his Homo Sacer project, this idea of the profane has followed Agamben's studies of the sacred like a shadow. With this new work, however, it has moved to the center of his reflections and in doing offers his reader a glimpse of hitherto unseen elements in his personal trajectory, his philosophical vocation, and his political project. The works in the Homo Sacer series have compellingly and persuasively argued that the creating of sacred and sovereign states of exception has often been responsible for the dire states of political affairs we find ourselves in. Profanations seeks to offer a solution.

Messages in a Bottle: An Interview with Filmmaker Masao Adachi

Harootunian, H., Kohso, S. — 2008-10-31

In the summer of 2006, Sabu Kohso, an independent writer, translator, and activist, and Harry Harootunian, a historian at New York University, interviewed the prominent filmmaker and political activist Masao Adachi. The occasion for the interview was the completion of his first film in Japan after years of imprisonment in Lebanon and Japan. Adachi's career and activities spanned the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps the most intense period of radical protest in Japan's postwar period. His experimental work constituted a significant intervention in these years of revolutionary promise and failure. After the failed revolution in Japan, he spent almost a quarter of a century in exile in Lebanon and Palestine, often working for Palestinian organizations.

Gramsci, Passive Revolution, and Media

Landy, M. — 2008-10-31

The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a restructuring of capital and redistribution of wealth to the top of an economic pyramid on an international scale. This neoliberal "reform" involves the gradual dismantling of the welfare state, relegation of the employed and unemployable to the bottom of the social and economic pyramid, and perpetual warfare on national and global fronts. Antonio Gramsci's analysis of "passive revolution" seems cogent for this moment, particularly for the ways media and other cultural forms play a significant role in mobilizing or disorganizing consent. The Prison Notebooks, published in 1948, influenced the thinking of Italian and postwar European intellectuals and filmmakers on the left, and they continue to be a reservoir for an examination of the character and relevance of passive revolution, forms of coercion and consent, relations between the State and civil society, and the position of intellectuals in the creation of hegemony. Visconti's films on the Risorgimento, The Leopard and Senso; Pasolini's films and writings on the cultural and political transformations wrought by the "Economic Miracle"; the critical work that emerged from Stuart Hall, among others, at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Study in the UK; and research generated by the Indian Subaltern Studies group are testimonials to Gramsci's ongoing legacy. These texts followed Gramsci in performing a multifaceted examination of language, political, and social institutions; however, despite prolific research on media, there is scant concerted attention to their contributions in the passive revolution begun in the 1970s.

Dialogue on Post-capitalism

Huibin, L., Dirlik, A. — 2008-10-31

The influential marketing analyst Peter Drucker's idea of post-capitalism has attracted considerable attention in recent years in the People's Republic of China. One of its proponents is Professor Li Huibin of the Contemporary Marxism Institute of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of the Communist Party of China, who has written extensively on questions of economics and philosophy. The dialogue was initiated at the invitation of Professor Li when Professor Arif Dirlik of the Chinese University of Hong Kong was a visiting scholar with the Contemporary Marxism Institute during the summer of 2006. The dialogue takes up questions of the relationship between Drucker's theory and Marxist theories of capitalism, the intellectual usefulness of "post-capitalism" in understanding contemporary developments in capitalism, and its possible relevance to the developmental strategy of "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

The Infinite Rehearsals of the Critique of Religion: Theological Thinking After Humanism

Walker, C. D. B. — 2008-10-31

What are the conditions of possibility for a critique of religion in a moment when the languages of religion and politics saturate and (over)determine critical discourse? How does one critically interrogate the contemporary manifestation of the phenomenon of religion when the imbrications of religion, power, and authority are such that religion is always already reduced to a function of either power or authority? How are we to formulate the question of a critique of religion when the very languages, concepts, and theories of critique are in question? In wrestling with these questions, this essay develops the notion of theological thinking as a form of critique and a critical theoretical practice for a moment bisected by the (re)turn to theology and the seeming permanence of the theologico-political. Following the examples of James Baldwin and W. E. B. Du Bois, theological thinking outlines a practice of criticism that responds to our moment not by rejecting or reducing the presence of the theological but rather by thinking through the very heart of it in order to expose the totalizing logics within the theologico-political, all the while locating and mobilizing those discarded critical practices that illuminate new directions for constructing alternative futures.

Reading for the Stimmung? About the Ontology of Literature Today

Gumbrecht, H. U. — 2008-10-31

For some years now, inside observers have felt that literary studies has arrived at a moment of stagnation. Not only has a fifty-year-long sequence of changing "paradigms" come to a standstill since the final years of the twentieth century; not only are we longing for new "master thinkers" who do not appear; but, epistemologically, we seem to be stuck in the extreme (and unfruitful) tension between seeing literary texts as "allegories" of the impossibility of language to refer to any outside referent (following the dogma of "deconstruction" and the linguistic turn) and a somehow naïve optimism regarding the capacity of literary texts to refer to an outside world as it is implicitly carried and sometimes professed by "cultural studies." In this situation, the concept of Stimmung (most frequently illustrated by metaphors of being wrapped into, say, weather, or the sound of music) offers an alternative view of the ontology of literature, without falling back into the long-frustrated attempts to "define literature." Many (if not all) of the texts that we call "literary" provide us with exactly this impression of "being wrapped" into the material world—a material world in which texts can evoke a material impression (the "lightest" possible material impression, however) through effects of prosody. "Reading for the `Stimmung'" can connect us with unusual immediacy to the Stimmung of a past historical period and a different cultural environment. "Reading for the `Stimmung'" may open new perspectives for the historical analysis and aesthetic appreciation of literary texts, and, at the same time, bring us back to a number of scholarly concerns that we have abandoned since the late 1970s.

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution and Its Reception

Lee, L. O.-f. — 2008-10-31

This essay aims to gauge the different receptions of Ang Lee's recent film Lust, Caution between American and Chinese publics and across a cultural landscape of the pan-Chinese regions of Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It also brings a contextual and historical dimension to bear on Ang Lee's intentions in making this film as well as on the differences of style and approach between Ang Lee and Eileen Chang, on whose original story the film is based. The essay pays particular attention to Ang Lee's diasporic background as a Chinese filmmaker from Taiwan with a cultural sensibility that makes his films not imitations of Hollywood products but manifestations of a particular sense of "repression" that stems from this background. Such symptoms of repression must be understood in terms of the historical context in which the story and film are based—Japanese Shanghai under the repressive collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei (1939–1945). The film's plot takes off directly from this context, which in turn informs Ang Lee's adaptation. The competing "structures of domination" come from two rivaling regimes of the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) as well as the Japanese military, which imprisons both the young heroine, a novice spy, and the villain, a security police chief of the "puppet" regime. Their sentimental and romantic entanglement, not pronounced in the original Eileen Chang story, bears a distinct trait of Ang Lee's directorial style as an artistic articulation of this sense of repression.

Hindutva and Informatic Modernization

Basu, A. — 2008-10-31

This essay is a critical evaluation of contemporary urban Hindutva in the light of Carl Schmitt's famous assertion that all liberal political concepts are transposed theological ones. Without agreeing with Schmitt's hard-right nationalism, one can see that from the discursive beginnings of Hindu nationalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century there has been an effort to "monothematize" a pan-Indian Hindu identity. That is, in the absence of an axiomatic church of "Hinduism," there was a literary-modern effort to telescope myriad devotional traditions, eclectic beliefs, practices, and customs into a single edifice of Hinduness. This effort, however, failed to overcome the historical differences of caste, gender, class, and region and invent a singular, constitutive discourse of Hindu being. The essay speculates that perhaps, in recent times, this project toward a Hindu normative literary modernity has been displaced by an "informatic modernization." A new urban Hinduness asserts itself more by its affects and spectacles than through the act of narration. This "informatic" public culture can orchestrate signs, emblems, mantras, and doctrines of disparate affiliations without completing a "story" as such. That is, it can do so without trying to resolve historical disputes that have dogged the career of Indian modernity (e.g., how exactly can caste be squared with scientific and democratic tempers?). The image of a "shining" Hindu normative metropolitanism is consolidated by groundless and nonobligatory mergers between neoliberal postulates and the pieties of a so-called tradition. The essay illustrates this phenomenon through some examples from popular Hindi cinema.

Of Accumulation: The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley

Lerner, B. — 2008-10-31

This essay attempts to take the measure of Robert Creeley's some sixty-year commitment to poetry as a medium for tracking the processes of thinking and speaking, not for the production of finished thoughts. By reading Creeley against Wallace Stevens, I hope to both identify the significant formal signatures of Creeley's poetry and to document how a projectivist poetics attempted to distinguish itself from an influential modernist predecessor, a poetic reorientation inseparable from the history of boundary 2.

Contributors

2008-10-31

Introduction

Dirlik, A. — 2008-07-07

The Great Transformation: The Double Movement in China

Shaoguang, W. — 2008-07-07

The End of the Peasant? New Rural Reconstruction in China

Day, A. — 2008-07-07

The Subsumption of Class Discourse in China

Ngai, P., Chan, C. K.-C. — 2008-07-07

Why Did the Cultural Revolution End?

Shaogong, H. — 2008-07-07

Chinese Education in the Era of Capitalist Globalization

Xie, S., Wang, F. — 2008-07-07

Scientific Worldview, Culture Debates, and the Reclassification of Knowledge in Twentieth-century China

Hui, W. — 2008-07-07

The Developmental Logic of Chinese Culture under Modernization and Globalization

Keping, Y. — 2008-07-07

The Importance of Being Chinese: Orientalism Reconfigured in the Age of Global Modernity

Yiu-Wai, C. — 2008-07-07

Books Received

2008-07-07

Contributors

2008-07-07

Timespace, Social Space, and the Question of Chinese Culture

Dirlik, A. — 2008-02-27

Foucault, Agamben: Theory and the Nazis

Mazower, M. — 2008-02-27

Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile: Audio (Il)literacy, or Beethoven's Triumphant Despair

Merod, J. — 2008-02-27

Grievable Life, Accountable Theory

Radhakrishnan, R. — 2008-02-27

A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism

Lauro, S. J., Embry, K. — 2008-02-27

The Pathology of Empire

Orwicz, M. R. — 2008-02-27

Eis tin Polis: Istanbul, December 1969

Spanos, W. V. — 2008-02-27

Badiou's Truth and the Office of the Critic: Naming the Militant Multiples of the Void

O'Hara, D. T. — 2008-02-27

Immigrant Nation/Nativist State: Remembering Against an Archive of Forgetfulness

Pease, D. E. — 2008-02-27

Thomas Pynchon Against the Day

Veggian, H. — 2008-02-27

Books Received

2008-02-27

Contributors

2008-02-27

Dead Fire Rekindled

Hui, W. — 2007-11-14

Circles of Curiosity

Fletcher, A. — 2007-11-14

On Richard Hofstadter and the Politics of "Consensus History"

Livingston, J. — 2007-11-14

Cosmopolitanism: New and Newer

Robbins, B. — 2007-11-14

What Is in the Cloud? A Critical Engagement with Thomas Metzger on "The Clash between Chinese and Western Political Theories"

Ci, J. — 2007-11-14

Faux Catholic: A Gothic Subgenre from Monk Lewis to Dan Brown

Nelson, V. — 2007-11-14

Sirens of Denial: Notes on the 2006 War between Israel and Hizbullah

Furani, K. — 2007-11-14

The Dilemmas of Contemporary Social Science

Hall, P. A. — 2007-11-14

Philosophizing with Marx, Gramsci, and Brecht

Haug, W. F. — 2007-11-14

The Case for a Vertical Ethics

Brown, M. — 2007-11-14

The Question of Torture, the Spanish Decadence, and Our Own

Beverley, J. — 2007-11-14

Books Received

2007-11-14

Contributors

2007-11-14