...Eli Friedlander This essay reflects on the questions introduced by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings's biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life . In particular, it considers how the biography addresses the difficult problem of drawing together a unity of life and writings in Benjamin's existence...

...Michelle Speidel Duke University Press 2001 Are We Not Genes? Stanley Shostak’s Deathof Life and The Evolution of Sameness and Difference Michelle Speidel The modern evolutionary paradigm of neo-Darwinism is increasingly...

...Anindyo Roy Duke University Press 2001 Savage Pursuits: The Shaping of Colonial Civility in E. M. Forster’s ‘‘The Life to Come’’ Anindyo Roy For conquering Clive, or Wellesley’s mightier name, The wide...

...R. Radhakrishnan © 2008 by Duke University Press 2008 Grievable Life, Accountable Theory R. Radhakrishnan In a world structured in dominance, is it viable, justifiable, and “con- scionable” to indulge in ontological thinking? What...

... Press 2011 All translations in this essay are my own. Intervention Better City, Better Life Better City There was a popular expression, in Shanghai anyway, that went “Miss the expo and you’ll regret it for...

...Anne Allison The essay takes on recent news stories of “missing elderly” (elderly whose deaths go unrecorded) and “lonely death” (bodies discovered days or weeks after someone has died all alone) to consider how life, death, and the bonds/debts of social relationality are getting recalibrated in...

...Antonia Birnbaum What is studying in its difference from institutions? Benjamin took up the problem of studying with all the energy of his student dissatisfaction. In one of his early texts he investigates the “life of students” under the aspect of a historical concept in which history appears to...

... anonymous woman pleas into the receiver for help, the discussion seeks to both locate and complicate the so-called human element captured in recordings of the voice. Using Eric Santner's notion of creaturely life as a conceptual lens, this piece argues that the melancholy poetics that often accompanies the...

... coauthoring. In this regard, allow me to cite Virginia Woolf's important contribution to the art of biography. Woolf encouraged biographers to seek vivid glimpses into their subject and to isolate rare private moments of intimacy that hopefully will bring the biographical subject to life. In her essay “The...

... differing domains: the family as a social institution and the family as a process of individual experiences, that is, the lived experience of family life. While the individualization of the family institution is mostly reflected in the weakening of the bonds between the family and the larger kinship...

... forces. As is happening elsewhere, Japan's construction of a new type of eco-city is being posed as a mediation of these varied conditions and forces; as a solution of sorts, it also promises to reorganize everyday life. Drawing on plans for the eco-city, this essay addresses the conditions of crisis and...

... principle of his writing is one of attachment to finite life, which is all the more profound because it remains faithful to the ambivalence of any attachment. The task is to “own” that this is the only life we have—for better and for worse—rather than seeking to leave this life behind. References...

... kind of beauty, so strong that it had to be forgotten. Her doomed life led me to reflect on how old inequalities are always repackaged in new ways. What does it mean, in the words of Harry Belafonte, to write about a “black woman” who had to pay a “price for her blackness”? Perhaps the only way right...

...Zhivka Valiavicharska What do we do with the monuments from the socialist past? This question continues to resurface with relentless persistence in Bulgaria’s public life. For the past twenty-five years, socialism’s monuments have suffered severe neglect, yet they have provided open terrains upon...

...Jim Merod Louis Armstrong's career inaugurated the commercial viability of jazz for five decades. It also created both the structural conditions and critical reception that allowed jazz to emerge into a “classical” art form, still in the process of reshaping itself today. Armstrong's life, however...

...David S. Randall; Robert P. Wilson This essay examines the confluence of personal memoir, scholarship, and classroom teaching in the intellectual life. The authors trace the theme of “bearing witness” as the axiom of the intellectual vocation at three different moments in the career of William V...

... experience, as elaborated here, speak in and through every word of his work and as such have formative power for the future because everyday life now is, as the title of this memoir declares, In the Neighborhood of Zero , that is, ever on the verge of extinction. What other critic’s work of the last half...

... informing an imperial power, beginning with the Romans. Finally, akin to Said in his commitment to the worldliness of life and art, Spanos contends that the messiness of life does not lend itself to the clear-cut oppositions that the nation-state tries to establish. I am thankful to Myrto Drizou and...

... tendencies (mobilism and broadcast) and to consider the intensive life that arises between them. Considering subjectivity not only in terms of “molar formations” (codes and ideologies) but also in terms of “molecular practices” (lived rhythms and daily activities) invites a tentative thesis about what is...

...Anne Allison; Harry Harootunian; Christopher T. Nelson The essays collected in this dossier focus on the diverse ways that temporalization is rescued, remade, or renounced in the crises and catastrophes that have transformed everyday life in contemporary Japan. As a rhythmanalysis of both crisis...