This essay, in the form of a letter written to director László Nemes in the immediate aftermath of viewing Son of Saul, is at once a critical reading of the film within a larger theoretical framework and a subjective emotional response to seeing on the screen something of the author’s own “most harrowing nightmares.” While bringing Nemes’s film into conversation with Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno

This introduction argues that Derrida’s analysis in “Christianity and Secularization” undercuts two influential interpretations of his work. Some readers assimilate Derrida to an indeterminate “religion without religion” while others claim that he represents a “radical atheism” that is opposed to religion as such. In contrast to the univocity of these readings, “Christianity and Secularization” clarifies

An introduction to an interview with Michel Foucault in 1979, which contextualizes his general stance on the Iranian uprising, as well as his conception of philosophical journalism and political spirituality, his rejection of the teleology of history, and his willingness to let historically silenced subjects speak for themselves.

This reflection on Palestine’s political impasses in relation to the experiences of other colonized places and peoples was inspired by the current ferment in critical indigenous and native studies, and now Palestinian studies, about settler colonialism. Tracing the promises and pitfalls of new imaginations of sovereignty and self-determination emerging through indigenous activism, the essay reflects

An interview with Michel Foucault in 1979 that was never published during his lifetime and was recently rediscovered in the archives. The interview, appearing for the first time in English and in its complete form, marks one of Foucault’s final public discussions of the contentious topic of the Iranian Revolution. In particular, Foucault clarifies what he means by “political spirituality” and addresses

The history of Iraq in the twentieth century, and perhaps the Middle East more broadly, is punctuated by an intellectual shift that has, for the most part, escaped the attention of scholars. It might be characterized as a shift from a problem of representation introduced by the rise of left-wing politics, to a problem of experience created by its failure. This shift registers in the work of writers

What is the relationship between art history and its objects? Responding to Jaś Elsner’s claim that art-historical writing is inevitably ekphrastic, this essay revisits a site of intense disciplinary anxiety—Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1759 description of the Belvedere Torso and its revised version in his 1764 History of Ancient Art. Description has been cast as the “scapegoat” (or pharmakos) of Winckelmann’s

In this essay Jacques Derrida reflects, for the first time at length, on secularization as a historical process. Whereas his earlier writings on religion focus on Jewish and Christian authors who blur the boundaries of religious belonging, this essay directly questions the categories of religion and secularization. Against this background, Derrida revisits the work of Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, Friedrich

However diverse and even conflicting definitions of world literature may be, there is a consensus in previous scholarship about circulation as a key defining feature. Being circulation modeled and (in)validated by a corpus of statutes, rules, and regulations, the absence of a law-oriented approach to world literature appears completely contradictory. This essay is a first step toward a more sustained

Throughout the 2016 US presidential election, pundits repeatedly described Donald Trump as a performance artist and his campaign as performance art. Meanwhile, his alt-right supporters were mounting performance art shows, debating the meaning of Marina Abramović’s work, and developing their own theories of political performance. For experts in performance theory, such punditry and provocation is like

When the threat posed by the digitalization of our lives is debated in our media, the focus is usually on the new phase of capitalism called surveillance capitalism: a total digital control over our lives exerted by state agencies and private corporations. However, important as this surveillance capitalism is, it is not yet the true game changer; there is a much greater potential for new forms of domination

Human genetics has uncovered a vast trove of medically relevant changes in our genomes—variants and mutations that are both far more common and difficult to interpret than experts anticipated. What will this mean as we move into an era of genomic or “precision” medicine? For over a century the overriding goal of human genetics was to explain the inheritance of traits and conditions that hailed from

Introducing this issue’s triptych on algorithms and culture, this article argues that prevailing modes of analysis that focus on the prospects for algorithms “taking over” are no longer useful. It advocates the need for a new conceptual vocabulary, which recognizes that algorithmic and cultural reasoning processes are already enmeshed with each other. The introduction suggests a need for an enterprise

This paper takes three distinct passes through the history of Machine Translation (MT) in the Soviet Union, which is typically understood as concentrating in a single boom period that lasted from roughly 1955 to 1965. In both the Soviet Union and the United States—in explicit competition with each other—there was a tremendous wave of investment in adapting computers to nonnumerical tasks that has only

Scholars in both digital humanities and media studies have noted an apparent disconnect between computation and the interpretive methods of the humanities. Alan Liu has argued that literary scholars employing digital methods encounter a “meaning problem” due to the difficulty of reconciling algorithmic methods with interpretive ones. Conversely, the media scholar Friedrich Kittler has questioned the

Quantitative literary research has a history stretching back to the early twentieth century and has attracted criticism for almost as long. But most critics of the project have argued, along with Stanley Fish, that numbers are useless because they fail to produce humanistic meaning. By contrast, Nan Z. Da’s “Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies” takes its stand inside the world

I argue that, in George Eliot’s early, definitive statement of realism in the seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede, realism will only have been accomplished when readers have learned not merely to respect, but to desire, the dysphorically sexed bodies of others. In this sense, I argue, realism shares a central tenet with two of the more controversial and, frankly, neglected dimensions of Freudian thinking—which

literal or complex/simple. It struggles with the imperative to reduce data to second-order classifications, which is necessary for statistical analysis ofmultidimensional data. It is axiomatically true that, as Andrew Piper writes, “generalization is a crucial aspect to any scholarly method,” but it is CLS itself that has an issue with the science of generalization. It has to abstract what it is looking

Nan Z. Da has thrown down a new gauntlet in the ongoing struggle to make sense of computational techniques in literary analysis, arguing that “there is a fundamental mismatch between the statistical tools that are used and the objects to which they are applied” (Nan Z. Da, “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies,” Critical Inquiry 45 [Spring 2019]: 601). She proposes a sort of

The special issue’s editors introduce the rationale for the following articles, all of which take up aspects of the relations among the production of artworks, the behavior of audiences, and the state’s interest in assembling, regulating, and transforming what it knows as its people through the responses to art.

Sucked–Out Lemons Few sexual metaphors are so striking as Immanuel Kant’s use of a lemon in the Lectures on Ethics. In the paragraph “Of Duties to the Body in Regard to the Sexual Impulse,” Kant critically opposes the sexual inclination (Geschlechterneigung) to the higher love of the human (Menschenliebe) and criticizes those who merely have sexual inclination: “In loving from sexual inclination, they

It is said that the dialectical method consists in doing justice each time to the historical situation of its object. But that is not enough. For it is just as much a matter of doing justice to the concrete historical situation of the interest taken in the object. . . . To approach, in this way, “what has been” means to treat it not historiographically, as heretofore, but politically, in political

The legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt is now probably best known for such aphorisms as the one he placed at the opening of Political Theology: “Sovereign is he who decides about the state of exception.” After Schmitt joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, he contributed quite actively to the radicalization of Nazi positions: in “Der Führer schützt das Recht” (The Führer Protects the Law)

The Last of the Unjust (Le Dernier des injustes) is a film structured by temporal delays, distensions, and reversals—a film that, in dealing with Theresienstadt and its “monde à la renverse,” obliges one to begin at the end and play it backwards. Such an approach is already adumbrated by the word dernier in the title. Start with the last—and the last one—it suggests, and work your way back. To move

If I begin by saying that this is an essay about Raymond Williams’s relation to the institution of Cambridge English, I risk losing two groups of readers I wish to reach. One group, the insiders, may think that the story has all been told before.Williams—author of a dozen and a half wide-ranging books in literary, cultural, and media studies over a thirty-five-year period—is a major figure in late

So, having written a lot of stuff about things, I was pretty much bent on leaving things behind. I started picking them back up again, though. Not one by one, but in curious clusters . . . batches and bundles, aggregations and agglomerations, compilations and constellations. You get the point. Still, insofar as famous philosophers and anthropologists are wont to remind us that the etymology of thing

I always found the name false which they gave us: Emigrants. That means those who leave their country. But we Did not leave, of our own free will Choosing another land. Nor did we enter Into a land, to stay there, if possible for ever. Merely, we fled. We are driven out, banned. Not a home, but an exile, shall the land be that took us in. Restlessly we wait thus, as near as we can to the frontier Awaiting

These notes, which deal with the Paris arcades, were begun under the open sky—a cloudless blue which arced over the foliage—and yet are covered with centuries of dust from millions of leaves through which have blown the fresh breeze of diligence, the measured breath of the researcher, the squalls of youthful zeal, and the idle gusts of curiosity. For the painted summer sky that peers down from arcades

There are many accounts of the history of Bitcoin and many predictions of its future. Some commentators report its imminent demise—others point to its latest uptick in price. The writing I read on Bitcoin, excellent though much of it is, increased my desire to understand it. This essay is a report on my effort to puzzle out this financial innovation, the extent to which it is an innovation, and the

Personalization purports to be about the individual, to be about nothing but the individual. It promises, in fact, to augment the individuality of the individual. But, at the same time, personalization necessitates a conversation about a particular form of grouping. This is especially true in networked and computational forms of personalization. This essay, in being about the burgeoning personalization

Earth System Science (ESS), the science that among other things explains planetary warming and cooling, gives humans a very long, multilayered, and heterotemporal past by placing them at the conjuncture of three (and now variously interdependent) histories whose events are defined by very different timescales: the history of the planet, the history of life on the planet, and the history of the globe

The University as a Crowd Universities in Europe are a medieval invention we owe to the Roman Catholic Church, which wemore succinctly call “the Church.”Today, they exist all around the world; they are secularized; they make up one of the major forms of the modern gathering. In 1921, Sigmund Freud studied crowd phenomena. He contrasted “natural” crowds, which form spontaneously, with “artificial” crowds

The recent epidemics of Ebola triggered epidemics of therapeutic nihilism. These latter outbreaks are recognized when health authorities and pundits proclaim that the primary task is to contain the spread of disease, rather than care for the stricken, because there’s not much to be done for them—the disease held to be “untreatable” in Africa. And an additional dose of nihilism has been administered

Thanks to Michel Foucault, one might say it has become possible to conceive that the political relevance of humanity in modern thought does not have to do with its “philosophical essence” but rather with its “nonessence.” Yet this very idea surfaced earlier in Western thought, at the time of the revolutionary turn towards a politicized humanitarianism, and helped to shape some crucial political strategies

Biological evolution, having proceeded for a few million years and produced humans, has now entered a new stage. I adapt a useful phrase from Terrence Deacon, “complexity catastrophe,” to denote the limits of human biological cognition in which further increases in capacity are constrained by the neuronal system’s processing speed and memory storage. The solution has been to invent computational media

Jonathan Lear takes Cora Diamond’s use of John Updike’s phrase “‘the difficulty of reality’” to mark “challenges to the mind’s ability to encompass the reality it seeks to comprehend.” “These,” writes Lear, “are not difficulties in the ordinary sense of the term,meaning problems to be solved or resolved” (Jonathan Lear, “Gettysburg Mourning,” Critical Inquiry 45 [Autumn 2018]: 97). Rather, they are

In his comment on my essay, Paul Kottman says that not only are the issues “unquestionably important” but that my way of raising them “is itself significant” (Paul Kottman, “Playing with the Dead: A Response to Jonathan Lear,” Critical Inquiry 46 [Autumn 2019]: 212). I agree. But Kottman misunderstands my way of raising them—and this initial misunderstanding distorts the rest of his interpretation

In 2015more than one million refugees of war, persecution, and poverty entered Europe and applied for asylum there. Just five years earlier the official count of asylum applicants had been much lower, closer to two hundred thousand. But over the northern summer and autumn of 2015 we heard the unprecedented numbers add up as boat after boat, all overcrowded, landed on Grecian shores and as long, almost

In late 1947, the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika published “Cholera,” a poem inspired by radio reports about the epidemic then raging through Egypt, one of the largest cholera outbreaks of the twentieth century, which left twenty thousand dead in its wake. Al-Mala’ika’s poem, first printed in the Lebanesemagazine al-‘Uruba (Arabism), is awork of anguishedwitness. The poet urges her readers to “listen”

Along similar lines in A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe viral outbreaks as rhizomatic models for various kinds of nonhierarchical communities. In their explanation of the intricate relationship between deterritorialization (the detachment of a sign from a given context) and reterritorialization (the repurposing of that sign in a new context), they write that “under certain

1 One sure sign, among many others, that the great melodramas of Douglas Sirk’s time at Universal Studios (1952–1959) might not be all they initially seem is the immediate ambiguity of the titles of many of the most ambitious ones. For example, All That Heaven Allows (1955) could suggest, “Look at all that heaven allows in its generosity.” And it could mean, “Be careful. This paltry consolation or

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things,”Henry David Thoreau writes inWalden (1854). In the century and a half since Thoreau withdrew to the Massachusetts woods, his thinking about modernity and mental life has become our common sense. Newmachines of work and play, so the story goes, are destroying our capacity to pay attention.We are always in touch

In March of 2013 a group of historians hacked the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum or DHM) in Berlin. The members of the group Kolonialismus im Kasten? (Colonialism in the Box?) reimagined those parts of the permanent exhibition that dealt with or, according to them, ought to have dealt with Germany’s colonial past. Initially, they organized alternative museum tours. Later they

The restoration of the aesthetic to a central position in the study of the arts has been among the most exciting critical developments of recent years. Critics have made diverse claims on behalf of aesthetics, among which we might discern two widely shared themes. First, aesthetic education constitutes not a retreat from politics but a means of contesting the neoliberal hegemony of the market. Second

1 The human hand cannot draw a straight line, John Ruskin claimed. No matter how well trained, it will inevitably produce curvature or a variety of direction. A century later, his claim seemed to underpin La Monte Young’s musically waywardComposition 1960 #10, which simply consists of the instruction “Draw a straight line and follow it.”Young’s earliest performances of this work in 1961 show his awareness

1 This essay works at the empirical level to isolate a series of technical problems, logical fallacies, and conceptual flaws in an increasingly popular subfield in literary studies variously known as cultural analytics, literary data mining, quantitative formalism, literary text mining, computational textual analysis, computational criticism, algorithmic literary studies, social computing for literary

Protocols are strategies designed to anticipate andmanage emergent contingencies. The concept of protocol originated in the key transitional period in the twelfth-century institutional literacy of post-Roman Europe.This essay aims to account for a crucial but rarely discussed attribute of protocols: that they contain within them processes of critical self-historicization that are fundamental to their

1. Kant avec Bentham The history of modern aesthetic thought is usually traced to Immanuel Kant and his Critique of the Power of Judgment, with an obligatory nod to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who had first used the term “aesthetics” in 1735 to identify judgments of taste. Kant’s place in modern aesthetic thought is so secure that it commands acknowledgment: even writers who oppose it root and branch

1 The Swiss pastor Johann Caspar Lavater promoted the discipline of physiognomics in the 1770s as a scientific method to gain a better understanding of humankind. He considered the case of Socrates the physiognomic scandal: Why did this philosopher, the wisest and noblest of men, look like a satyr and thus subhuman? Today not many would consider physiognomics a scientific approach; still, what Lavater

Critical studies has come to sing a chorus of collective disavowal of the computer’s visuality. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, for instance, that computers are not “inherently visual tools,” and Jacob Gaboury has made the case recently evenmore emphatically: “The computer is not a visual medium.” The reasons for these statements seem relatively straightforward when taking into account the authors’ subsequent

Care has always been there, yet somehow it has remained invisible. This is the founding lament of the sociology of care. Its mission as a scientific endeavor is to dedicate more attention to a critical infrastructure of social reproduction that needs to be rescued from the corrosive damage of systematic neglect. Care needs care is the mantra of a sociology of care that fashions itself as a progressive

Everyone knows that “practical letters” as opposed to “fine arts” or literature shaped “the earliest phase of [American] national life.” That utile focus prevailed from the first years of colonial settlement to the founding years of the republic and “perhaps,” as Constance Rourke once surmised, further beyond into “later phases” of American history as well. Indeed, given the length and complexity of

At an otherwise unnoteworthy moment during his 18 January 1978 lecture at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault stumbles just when he is about to resume his discussion of the “apparatuses of security” (dispositifs de sécurité). In both the English and French edition of the lecture, the interruption is footnoted in the text. Apparently, Foucault had bumped into the microphone of the device recording

Ever since Dipesh Chakrabarty opened a Pandora’s box on the definition of humanity during the Anthropocene, the question of establishing a new continuity between the domain of necessity (nature) and the domain of freedom (society) has been raised. In this paper we claim that freedom, understood as the capacity to obey one’s own laws—that is, autonomy—could offer a common ground for ecological politics

1. Reasoned and Spiritual Exercises On Wednesday, 21 July 1773, Eliphalet Pearson and Theodore Parsons, two graduating students from Harvard College, publicly disputed whether the enslavement of Africans was compatible with natural law. The political tension of the moment did not spare the college. In 1768–69, British troops stationed in King Street (now State Street) leveled their cannons at the State

Queer theory has had something to say about sex, but until recently it has had almost nothing to say about love. Love has seemed too intimately bound up with institutions and discourses of the “normal,” too deeply embedded in standard narratives of romance, to be available for “queering.” Whereas sex, as queers know very well, is easy to stigmatize (or to celebrate) as kinky, transgressive, or perverse

1 But, first of all, a brief introduction is needed to explain howmy obsession with morphology began. The event that initiated my trajectory as a historian took place in 1963 at the State Archive of Venice (I have told this story several times, each time from a different angle). I was looking for witchcraft trials in the vast inquisition archive that is preserved ai Frari, in the former Franciscan

The balance is the oldest element in the iconography of justice, both secular and divine. First encountered in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it resurfaces in Persian religious texts, in the Old and New Testament, and in the Koran. The association between justice and the balance was further emblematized by the Greek goddesses Dike and Themis and to a lesser extent by Roman Iustitia. It was eventually

In recent years, Arnold Davidson has developed a passion for the thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993). Rabbi Soloveitchik had the dual distinction of having been both one of the most renowned Talmudists of the twentieth century and one of the most significant Jewish philosophers of that period—though this latter recognition emerged posthumously. In his lifetime, Rabbi Soloveitchik’s

I met Arnold I. Davidson in July 2007 at the conference “Ruptures: Music, Philosophy, Science, and Modernity,” co-organized by Davidson and the composer Martin Brody and held at the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Davidson’s lecture, “Exemplarity and the Aesthetics of Difference: From Michel Foucault to Cecil Taylor,” particularly the sections on my former mentors Muhal Richard