...Yuri Andrukhovych In this excerpt from the novel Twelve Circles , photographer Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen takes leave of his earthly body and experiences an unexpected lightness of being. It is just before dawn on Easter Sunday, but he does not turn toward the resurrection of the rising sun; he sets...

...Eli Friedlander The task of the present commentary on “Critique of Violence” is to bring to light a progression in Walter Benjamin's essay that has important implications for the assessment of the essay's content. One should not take violence as a generic term and view the essay as enumerating...

...Terry Smith Cézanne's comment, in a letter to a younger artist, “I owe you the truth in painting and I shall tell it to you,” is often cited by commentators, including other artists, exhibition curators, art historians, and philosophers. Some take it up as a pointer to the kinds of truth available...

... qualifies this by stressing the limited number of persons with unmitigatedly sincere intention. He ultimately takes China's scholar-gentry to task for having a far greater degree of moral culpability in the present situation than they are willing to admit, rather than blaming it all on the corruption of the...

...Peter Szendy Taking a close reading of the Marx Brothers' film The Big Store (1941) as its thread, this article explores the possibility of extending the concept of fetishism to the very performance of music, that is, to the bodily gestures and keyboardistic fingerings executed by Chico and Harpo...

... Zionist justificatory regime undergoes a significant modification when, in the 1950s, the United States takes over the sponsorship of the Israeli state from the Old World empires. It will show, specifically, the imperial ideology of the Old World that was the original model of the Zionist justificatory...

... behavioral economics and refers to the use of game mechanics in traditionally nongame activities—as a form that economic, social, and cultural life increasingly takes in the present. After exploring how the gamified world of the early twenty-first century departs dramatically from a society oriented around...

... approaching Ellison’s posthumously published novel that takes seriously Ellison’s move away from the tropes and figures of race that concerned him in his previous work. I argue that Ellison’s novel speaks directly to our contemporary moment and what he already saw in 1982: the “potent and dangerous force...

... 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...

... possibilities for such a geopolitically expanded, methodologically hybridized encounter: the postcolonial study of popular (post)socialist television; a postcolonial take on the European circulation of socialist film cultures; and contemporary reality television focused on the European underclass. © 2014 by...

... battlegrounds of contention: that of memory politics, the critique of political correctness, and the debate around the reception of Western institutions and intellectual paradigms. Taking a closer look especially at the Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian discussions, the essay also identifies some of the most...

... 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...

... other words, what use are innovative forms and approaches in telling raced or unraced stories by raced subjects? Conversely, what's at stake for the white writer who takes up racial subjects without hedging, pleasing, or apology? And, lastly, is there something about the contemporary moment that...

... Being and Time , namely, that it takes Dasein itself as both the agent and the witness— the source of phenomenological evidence or testimony—for the inquiry. Dasein, that is, being both the philosophical inquirer and the entity that calls itself “I,” whose being is being-with “others,” can be none other...

... indicates that his critique of Grant rests upon a diagnosis of a shift in the temporality of politics following the US Civil War. Taking Grant as exemplary of this more thoroughgoing historical transformation, Adams examines the intertwining within the administration of two seemingly contrary...

...Brian Reed This review essay takes the occasion of the publication of the Fourth Edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics to ask what it might mean, in the digital present, to use print as a medium for trying to speak comprehensively and authoritatively about the history of...

...Russ Castronovo How was public opinion forged in the Atlantic world during the age of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions? This essay takes up this question by looking at the vexed role of propaganda in manufacturing democratic consent. In particular, it examines a counterfeit set of...

... politics. Haug takes as his starting point the guiding question of a 2006 conference in Athens, namely whether the current political conjuncture should be interpreted as one of imperialism or, in Hardt and Negri's sense, as empire. He recasts this question from one of interpretation to one of history, and...

... original, an approach that makes it difficult for us to take part in what Adorno once called “the dream of a world in which things would be different.” Shahid instead widens the circle of “friends” addressed in Faiz's Urdu and in the process renders creative interpretations of fidelity revolutionary in a...

... form would result in China merely pursuing an elite-driven rationality at the expense of allowing it to develop its own particular subjective agency. Wang Hui also takes on perhaps the most controversial aspect of Lu Xun's essay—the defense of popular “superstition” against the attempts to suppress it...