...Mario De Caro; Telmo Pievani For many centuries, since the beginning of the modern age, the Roman Catholic Church held an ambivalent attitude toward science, until an enlightened position seemed to prevail at the end of the twentieth century, with two papal statements that respectively concerned...

...Jason Michael Adams This interview was conducted on the assumption that for all their seeming pessimism, Virilio's technocultural writings are more productively understood as a “Dionysian yes” than as a simple assertion of the no as such. In other words, they presuppose that the specificity of his...

... with what degree of importance. The ethics of the other seems dangerously close to existentialist versions of authenticity. The test case is Simon Critchley’s elegantly argued Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance . This book seems trapped into having to convert the...

...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...

... 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...

... 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...

... “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...

... formidable and awry range of local devotional traditions and deities, entailed a form of modernist transcoding that was tendentially monotheistic. It would seem that a singular Hindu national imagination could be secured only when such myriad energies–differing vastly in terms of caste, class, region, local...

... preoccupation with the twentieth century’s supreme comparand of state crime, National Socialism. Bolaño’s seeming promotion of Nazism to mythical status in fact serves the more urgent geopolitical project of mapping a continental American history with US political power firmly at its center. The essays reads...

... reconcile the universalist goals that are the legacies of Euromodernity to radical thinking with the demands of cultural voices emanating from newly empowered societies that make their own claims on modernity, especially when contradictions between the two seem irreconcilable. Some claims to “alternative...

...Gavin Steingo; Jairo Moreno Questions of value might seem beyond the pale in cases of sound and music. Both are objects of immense accumulation, appreciation, exploration, and investment—not just for the human species but also among other species, and indeed the world. Sound simply is, its...

... standing seemed secure in their day yet have disappeared from view. © 2017 by Duke University Press 2017 modernism anthologies American poetry historicism References Allen Hervey Heyward DuBose . 1922 . Carolina Chansons: Legends of the Low Country . New York : Macmillan...

...Bruce Robbins War photography, a pervasive aspect of the militarization of everyday life, seems to work on the commonsensical premise that the world needs to know in order to be able to make proper decisions, in order to act. But what happens when war photographs age, when the events they recorded...

... represented by French theory) was taken up by antihumanist trends, while in communist Eastern Europe it began to unfold under the aegis of “man.” By taking up the threads of this problematic divergence, the essay aims to provide a focusing lens that sharpens but also delimits a vast issue which seems to be...

... growing transparency of the world, where life of faraway people fascinates and attracts. Such a spatial disposition, where the object of desire always slips away into a different space, at the same time accessible and out of reach for now, supplies the fuel for the capitalist machine. It seems that such a...

... about politics. It seemed right that boundary 2 should take notice of Mandela and his influence. We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason...

... them with the “self-evidently natural laws” of the economic. One consequence of this substitution of the economic for the political is the emergence of “second-handedness,” a condition that may seem to be a contingent property of the region but may be the harbinger of things to come for the rest of the...

... rampant subjectivity, exercising total domination over materials, but equally of rampant essences that mold or mock the ego. It is associated no less with heightened subjective expression than it is with the opposite: depersonalization, objectivity, ontology. The essay attempts to theorize this seeming...

... important developments in current politics. One of the most notable aspects of the literature is its unwillingness to approach neoliberalism primarily as a set of epistemological precepts, recruited in service of a political program. Marxists in particular seem to find this proposition an anathema—and there...

... the status quo, one in which certain antidemocratic drives commiserate over historical conflicts and strategize for an extended, ongoing, and relentless process of global dominance. The popular reception of Wolf Totem crystallizes the thrust and conduct of these seeming competing drives. In the final...