...Donna Haraway DONNA HARAWAY The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse1 for Robert Filomeno, who loved peace and died of AIDS, and with thanks to Scott Gilbert, Rusten Hogness, Rayna Rapp, and Joan Scott if Koch's postulates must be fulfilled...

...Linda M. G. Zerilli LINDA M. G. ZERILLI RelDelDoration or War? French FelDinist Narrative and the Politics of Self-Representation There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Orjailing...

... necessarily dictating it), then the peculiar identity and ubiquity of a norm is neither restricted nor prohibited. In sum, what is normal about a norm? This essay explores power’s intransitivity, its “self-possession,” by interrogating the way that cultural analysis routinely assumes that the workings...

... for their reception, Bersani brackets the literature on sociality and sexuality that has come before, including his own, which variously posits the homosexual and the queer as figures of radical negation. Averse to such recuperations of the sovereign self, Bersani’s bracketing instead makes space for the homoerotic...

...Karen Barad This essay explores the act of touching as it takes place in physical matter, in theorizing, and in the productive spaces where the two are indistinguishable. First, the author considers how feminist theory goes about touching science and unpacks touch as an act that reveals the self...

...Warren Montag Is Spinoza a theoretician of self-interest? Historians of philosophy have arrived at diametrically opposed answers to this question. His introduction of the term conatus , meaning endeavor or striving, in part 3 of the Ethics , together with his assertion that when human beings most...

... or the creation of timelines and lifelines, these researchers want to help individuals achieve comprehensive memories, which they hope will lead to greater self-understanding and, ultimately, to greater self-management. In doing so, these memories are made to matter, they are made material, and as they are stored...

... differentiation of state capitalism as the era of ideology and market capitalism as the era of commodity fetishism, this new theory argues that biopolitical mechanisms are organized around the transhistorical prohibition of self-referentiality—a prohibition that constitutes the very precondition for any society...

... of social order and the limits of knowledge. Through analyses of eighteenth- and twenty-first-century cultural texts, she posits that this new cultural discourse, germane to free-market capitalism, is best understood as epistemically governed by the affective concept of a “headless” feeling soma self...

...Brady Thomas Heiner Among the principal demands of contemporary political theory and practice is to determine habitable alternatives to (1) the violent and falsely two-sided dynamic of sovereignty and (2) the modern equation of the unitary, self-governing entity with the human itself. This essay...

... asylum seekers will be recognized as having a credible fear of persecution. To unhcr officers conducting asylum interviews, a claimant’s gender nonconformity functions as a proxy for credibility. Self-identified bears, with their masculine gender expression, cannot pass this litmus test and thus...

...Elissa Marder In “Cradling,” a chapter of Baudelaire and Freud , Leo Bersani shows how desire rocks the self. Desire always manifests as a movement that draws the self both toward and away from the object that excites it. Rocking simultaneously invokes infantile erotic enjoyment, an adult sexual...

...Tom Holert Aiming at rendering “somewhat irrelevant” the “question of sadism” in the critique of film’s “seductive epistemological promise,” Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit argued for a “participation in the film” that is “at once self-reflexive and self-shattering.” Such participation may bring...

...Corey McEleney “The Resistance to Overanalysis” carefully analyzes the rhetoric that the business community, the self-help industry, and mass culture more generally use to pathologize overanalysis as an unhelpful, counterproductive practice that inhibits people’s efforts at reaching their goals...

...Salvatore F. Guido In 1923, Freud initiated a debate with the pacifist, mystic, and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, to whom he revealed that he felt a “mysterious attraction.” Their correspondence, which culminated in Freud’s remarkable piece of self-analysis “A Disturbance of Memory...

... hypersensitivity to this issue, which has resulted in a proliferation of suggested translations and discussions up to and beyond Derrida. The second aspect becomes manifest in the transformation the translation undergoes from Kojève to his self-professed disciple, Lacan. Kojève's “taking down” becomes “raising...

...: the sadomasochistic blur of sexuality and violence. In effect, she sets up an s/m scene of and for feminism. The self-flagellating reading pleasures of MacKinnon unsettle the relation between her dismissal of lesbian sadomasochism and her own s/m textuality. This is not to say that her argument is flawed...

...Ariella Azoulay More than once Arendt denied being a public figure and added that she did not entertain any “ambition to become one.” This poses a challenge to any filmmaker seeking to portray her character, as Margarethe von Trotta found when she contradicted Arendt’s self-perception to inquire...

... difference. “Keeping” house, then, is figured in leaving it, at a formal level of indistinction between inside and outside. At this level, the novel suggests a model for thinking agency, or decision, predicated on the uncertainty of identification and the need for self-critical reflection on the thetic...