... but instead in relation to “discourses” (like anthropology or archaeology), the essay contests Kwon's arguments that artists like Mark Dion and Renée Green relativize artistic practice in relation to other disciplines and that their work breaks with the concerns of art history. Demonstrating instead how...

... of perception and interspecies research, a “singing with,” not just about or like, the nonhuman animal. The infrahuman sounds of Lila Zemborain's jellyfish (“Mauve Sea Orchids”) or the revolving phonemes of Emily Dickinson's hummingbird (“A route of evanescence”) organize perception and citation along...

...Bruce Robbins Early postcolonial critics were at worst ambivalent about secularism, and more likely either uninterested or, like Edward Said, extremely enthusiastic. What is the meaning of the recent turn against secularism by critics in and around the field Said did so much to establish...

... be equipped to synchronize with other monothematic mantras of modernity like scientific progress, democracy, or techno-financial development. The essay visits some nodal moments of this historical narrative–the coming into being of a Hindu “tradition” under the auspices of colonial Indology, Rammohun Roy’s...

... to be concentrated in a single focal point, like those traditionally found in the utopian images of the philosophers. He goes on to speak of elements of an ultimate condition that are deeply embedded in every present day. I would like to take these propositions as hints to the Benjaminian concept of study, and I...

..., or transubstantiation.” “Transubstantiate my form, says Daphne [as muse to Apollo, archetypal Greco-Roman poet].” In this essay, Brown will play Daphne provoking and inspiring in figures like Apollo what he terms as the “be leafing” (believing) patterns in a world-transforming visionary poet like Bob Dylan...

...Ben Lerner It is a commonplace that John Ashbery's poetry is, in some important sense, “about time,” but we lack an account of the specific experience of temporality it enables. Part of the bizarre power of Ashbery's best poetry is that it seems to narrate what it is like to read Ashbery's best...

... that is etymologically at the root of the word amateur —that is required for art-work. For Stiegler, Marcel Duchamp is an exemplar of this work precisely because of his libidinal discourse with art, most evident in the readymades, referred to by Stiegler as “not a burning scandal but something like a mute surprise...

... 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...

...Silvia D. Spitta This essay frames an extended 2008 interview with Peter Schumann, founder and director of the Bread and Puppet Theater collective, through a discussion of how the sixties spread like wildfire across the world. The author rescues the sixties' understanding that liberation could only...

... to modern theoretical developments like Eugene Nida's concept of dynamic equivalence. The aim is to formulate and argue for the comprehensiveness and ethical value of a hermeneutic model, the notion that translation is a variable interpretation that is culturally and historically contingent. The ethics...

...’ attempts to write a human-interest story about a man who is able to defecate perfectly formed sculptures made of shit, “The Suffering Channel” satirizes the insularity and narcissism that plagues Americans, even those who, like the interns who work at Style , imagine themselves to be cosmopolitans. Wallace...

..., by giving an account of what it was like for him as a person who had grown up in an orthodox Catholic family in America in the second half of the twentieth century to suddenly find himself, in reading Milton, to be living in a world where bitsiness was the rule. He had to learn to read things literally...

... within. Accented criticism is a principle of reading globally that shifts focus toward dialogism and toward the “double-accented” word, to help examine existing ways of ordering the world and to ask what effective decentering might look like. Reading fragments from Derek Walcott’s Omeros , Joseph...

... has historical causes, and the history is a disputed one. Cities and people have multiple names, boundaries are uncertain, and there is no agreement on a protocol to settle contested issues. This introduction, like the collection of essays that follow, shies away from explaining why this may...

...Alexander Etkind The early twenty-first-century Russia still calls itself, and is called, “post-Soviet.” But this term increasingly sounds like a purposeful euphemism, which both insiders and observers from outside are using to conceal the novelty of Putinism. Though Putinism is entirely different...

... unorthodox conception of what Heidegger meant by the term Dasein . On the standard reading, although the word is not synonymous with “person” or “human being,” it nevertheless refers to what those terms refer to, namely individual people like you and me. Haugeland maintains, instead, that it designates...

... independence, just like March 20, 1956 (Independence Day), or April 9, 1938. This key date will go down not only in the collective Tunisian memory, but also in the memory of the world as a turning point in modern history. Looking at what is happening in Tunisia now, one cannot help but ask how revolutions...

... and allegory). Building out from the “Dylan controversy” of spring 2011, the analysis probes Dylan’s post-Beat poetic tactics from works like “All along the Watchtower” and “Chimes of Freedom” to socialist-Judeo-Christian works of blasted prophecy from Modern Times and Tempest . “Bob Dylan in China, America...