40 Critical Theory Books Published In 2013

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Vol I

By Rosa Luxemburg

This first volume in Rosa Luxemburg’s Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 1, contains some of Luxemburg’s most important statements on the globalization of capital, wage labor, imperialism, and pre-capitalist economic formations.

In addition to a new translation of her doctoral dissertation, “The Industrial Development of Poland,” Volume I includes the first complete English-language publication of her “Introduction to Political Economy,” which explores (among other issues) the impact of capitalist commodity production and industrialization on non- capitalist social strata in the developing world. Also appearing here are ten recently discovered manuscripts, none of which has ever before been published in English.

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Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art

By Jacques Ranciere

Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.

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What is a Classic? : Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon

By Ankhi Mukherjee

What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature, Mukherjee demonstrates the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures, and multimedia adaptations of world classics. Throughout, Mukherjee attunes traditional literary critical concerns to the value contestations mobilizing postcolonial and world literature. The breadth of debates and topics she addresses, as well as the book’s ambitious historical schema, which includes South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America, set this study apart from related titles on the bookshelf today.

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The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic

by Stanley Rosen

Although Hegel considered Science of Logic essential to his philosophy, it has received scant commentary compared with the other three books he published in his lifetime. Here philosopher Stanley Rosen rescues the Science of Logic from obscurity, arguing that its neglect is responsible for contemporary philosophy’s fracture into many different and opposed schools of thought. Through deep and careful analysis, Rosen sheds new light on the precise problems that animate Hegel’s overlooked book and their tremendous significance to philosophical conceptions of logic and reason.

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Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo

By Thomas Nail

Get the First 50 Pages of ‘Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo’ for Free

We are witnessing the return of political revolution. However, this is not a return to the classical forms of revolution: the capture of the state, the political representation of the party, the centrality of the proletariat or the leadership of the vanguard. After the failure of such tactics over the last century, revolutionary strategy is now headed in an entirely new direction.

This book argues that Deleuze, Guattari and the Zapatistas are at the theoretical and practical heart of this new direction. Returning to Revolution is the first full-length book devoted to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of revolution and to their connection with Zapatismo.

Read Nathan Jun’s full review here.

 Download the first 50 pages here.

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Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness

By Etienne Balibar

John Locke’s foundational place in the history of British empiricism and liberal political thought is well established. So, in what sense can Locke be considered a modern European philosopher? Identity and Difference argues for reassessing this canonical figure. Closely examining the “treatise on identity” added to the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Etienne Balibar demonstrates Locke’s role in the formation of two concepts central to the metaphysics of the subject— consciousness and the self—and the complex philosophical, legal, moral and political nature of his terms.

With an accompanying essay by Stella Sandford, situating Balibar’s reading of Locke in the history of the reception of the Essay and within Balibar’s other writings on “the subject,” Identity and Difference rethinks a crucial moment in the history of Western philosophy.

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Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway

By Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick

Feminist theorist and philosopher Donna Haraway has substantially impacted thought on science, cyberculture, the environment, animals, and social relations. This long-overdue volume explores her influence on feminist theory and philosophy, paying particular attention to her more recent work on companion species, rather than her “Manifesto for Cyborgs.”

Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick argue that the ongoing fascination with, and re-production of, the cyborg has overshadowed Haraway’s extensive body of work in ways that run counter to her own transdisciplinary practices. Sparked by their own personal “adventures” with Haraway’s work, the authors offer readings of her texts framed by a series of theoretical and political perspectives: feminist materialism, standpoint epistemology, radical democratic theory, queer theory, and even science fiction. They situate Haraway’s critical storytelling and “risky reading” practices as forms of feminist methodology and recognize her passionate engagement with “naturecultures” as the theoretical core driving her work. Chapters situate Haraway as critic, theorist, biologist, feminist, historian, and humorist, exploring the full range of her identities and reflecting her commitment to embodying all of these modes simultaneously.

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Shock and Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

By William V. Spanos

Inspired by the foreign policy entanglements of recent years, William V. Spanos offers a dramatic interpretation of Twain’s classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, providing a fresh assessment of American exceptionalism and the place of a global America in the American imaginary. Spanos insists that Twain identifies with his protagonist, particularly in his defining use of the spectacle, and thus with an American exceptionalism that uncannily anticipates the George W. Bush administration’s normalization of the state of exception and the imperial policy of “preemptive war,” unilateral “regime change,” and “shock and awe” tactics. Equally stimulating is Spanos’s thoroughly original ontology of American exceptionalism and imperialism and his tracing of these forces, through a chronological examination of Twain studies and criticism over the past century.

As an examination of an overlooked text, and a critical history of American studies from its origins in the nation-oriented Myth and Symbol school of the Cold War era to its present globalizing or transnationalizing perspective, Shock and Awe will appeal to a broad audience of American literature scholars and beyond.

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Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World

By Timothy Morton

Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.

Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning.

Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.

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Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)

By Clayton Crockett
 

First published in 1997, Alain Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamor of Being cast Gilles Deleuze as a secret philosopher of the One. In this work, Clayton Crockett rehabilitates Deleuze’s position within contemporary political and philosophical thought, advancing an original reading of the thinker’s major works and a constructive conception of his philosophical ontology. Through close readings of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Felix Guattari), and Cinema 2, Crockett argues that Deleuze is anything but the austere, quietistic, and aristocratic intellectual Badiou had portrayed. Instead, Crockett underscores Deleuze’s radical aesthetics and innovative scientific, political, and mathematical forms of thought. He also refutes the notion Deleuze retreated from politics toward the end of his life. Using Badiou’s critique as a foil, Crockett maintains the profound continuity of Deleuze’s work and builds a general interpretation of his more obscure formulations.

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The Antinomies of Realism

By Fredric Jameson

The Antinomies of Realism is a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives—what today’s book reviewers dub “serious novels,” which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past.

Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism’s emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history.

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Kristeva's Fiction (Suny Series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature)

By Benigno Trigo

With published work spanning more than forty years, Julia Kristeva’s influence in psychoanalysis and literary theory is difficult to overstate. In addition to this scholarship Kristeva has written several novels, however this portion of her oeuvre has received comparatively scant attention. In this book, Kristeva scholars from a number of disciplines analyze her novels in relation to her work in psychoanalysis, interrogating the relationships between fiction and theory. The essays explore questions including, what is the value of experimental writing that escapes easy definition and classification, putting ideas at the same level as character, pacing, plot, suspense, form, and style? And, how might such fiction help its readers overcome the psychological maladies that affect contemporary society? The contributors make a compelling case for understanding Kristeva’s fiction as a crucial influence to her wider psychoanalytic project.

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The Village Against The World

By Dan Hancox

One hundred kilometres from Seville lies the small village of Marinaleda, which for the last thirty-five years has been the centre of a tireless struggle to create a living utopia. This unique community drew British author Dan Hancox to Spain, and here for the first time he recounts the fascinating story of villagers who expropriated the land owned by wealthy aristocrats and have, since the 1980s, made it the foundation of a cooperative way of life.

Today, Marinaleda is a place where the farms and the processing plants are collectively owned and provide work for everyone who wants it. A mortgage is €15 per month, sport is played in a stadium emblazoned with a huge mural of Che Guevara, and there are monthly ‘Red Sundays’ when everyone works together to clean up the neighbourhood. Leading this revolution is the village mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, who in 2012 became a household name in Spain after heading raids on local supermarkets to feed the Andalusian unemployed.

Read the CT review, or buy it here.

Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity

Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual’s free time.

According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the “shrinking of the present,” a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on “slipping slopes,” a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

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Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty

By Giorgio Agamben

In this follow-up to The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church’s attempts to repeat Christ’s unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure instrument of God’s power, so that his own motives and character are entirely indifferent as long as he carries out his priestly duties. In modernity, Agamben argues, the Christian priest has become the model ethical subject. We see this above all in Kantian ethics. Contrasting the Christian and modern ontology of duty with the classical ontology of being, Agamben contends that Western philosophy has unfolded in the tension between the two. This latest installment in the study of Western political structures begun in Homo Sacer is a contribution to the study of liturgy, an extension of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, and a reworking of Heidegger’s history of Being.

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Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler

By Various.

Despite a deep familiarity with the philosophical tradition and despite the groundbreaking influence of her own work, Simone de Beauvoir never embraced the idea of herself as a philosopher. Her legacy is similarly complicated. She is acclaimed as a revolutionary thinker on issues of gender, age, and oppression, but although much has been written weighing the influence she and Jean-Paul Sartre had on one another, the extent and sophistication of her engagement with the Western tradition broadly goes mostly unnoticed. This volume turns the spotlight on exactly that, examining Beauvoir’s dialogue with her influences and contemporaries, as well as her impact on later thinkers—concluding with an autobiographical essay by bell hooks discussing the influence of Beauvoir’s philosophy and life on her own work and career. These innovative essays both broaden our understanding of Beauvoir and suggest new ways of understanding canonical figures through the lens of her work.

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Rhapsody for the Theatre

By Alain Badiou

For Alain Badiou, theatre—unlike cinema—creates a space in which philosophy can be lived. It is, of all the arts, the most closely related to politics: both depend on a limited number of texts or statements, which are collectively enacted by a group of actors or militants who test the limits of the structure inn which they are confined, be it the medium of drama or the nation-state. For this reason, the history of theatre is inseparable from the history of state repression and censorship.

This definitive collection of Badiou’s work on the theatre includes not only the title essay ‘Rhapsody for the Theatre’, originally published as a pamphlet in France, but also essay on Jean-Paul Sartre, on the political destiny of contemporary drama, and on Badiou’s own work as a playwright.

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The Contradictions of "Real Socialism": The Conductor and the Conducted

by Michael Lebowitz.

What was “real socialism”—the term which originated in twentieth-century socialist societies for the purpose of distinguishing them from abstract, theoretical socialism? In this volume, Michael A. Lebowitz considers the nature, tendencies, and contradictions of those societies. Beginning with the constant presence of shortages within “real socialism,” Lebowitz searches for the inner relations which generate these patterns. He finds these, in particular, in what he calls “vanguard relations of production,” a relation which takes the apparent form of a social contract where workers obtain benefits not available to their counterparts in capitalism but lack the power to decide within the workplace and society.

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Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity

by Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri, one of the world’s leading scholars on Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and his contemporary legacy, offers a straightforward explanation of the philosopher’s elaborate arguments and a persuasive case for his ongoing relevance. Responding to a resurgent interest in Spinoza’s thought and its potential application to contemporary global issues, Negri demonstrates the thinker’s special value to politics, philosophy, and related disciplines.

Negri’s work is both a return to and an advancement of his initial affirmation of Spinozian thought in The Savage Anomaly. He further defends his understanding of the philosopher as a proto-postmodernist, or a thinker who is just now, with the advent of the postmodern, becoming contemporary. Negri also connects Spinoza’s theories to recent trends in political philosophy, particularly the reengagement with Carl Schmitt’s “political theology,” and the history of philosophy, including the argument that Spinoza belongs to a “radical enlightenment.” By positioning Spinoza as a contemporary revolutionary intellectual, Negri addresses and effectively defeats twentieth-century critiques of the thinker waged by Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben.

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The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism

By Samir Amin

Renowned political economist Samir Amin, engaged in a unique lifelong effort both to narrate and affect the human condition on a global scale, brings his analysis up to the present—the world of 2013. The key events of our times—financial crisis, the emerging nations, globalization, financialization, political Islam, Euro–zone implosion—are related in a coherent, historically based, account.

Changes in contemporary capitalism require an updating of definitions and analysis of social classes, class struggles, political parties, social movements and the ideological forms in which they express their modes of action in the transformation of societies. Amin meets this challenge and lays bare the reality of monopoly capitalism in its general, global form. Ultimately, Amin demonstrates that this system is not viable and that the implosion in progress is unavoidable. Whether humanity will rise to the challenge of building a more humane global order free of the contradictions of capital, however, is yet to be seen.

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Ranciere Now

by Oliver Davis

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière is well known across the world for his groundbreaking contributions to aesthetic and political theory and for his radical rethinking of the question of equality. This much-needed new collection situates Rancière’s thought in a range of practical and theoretical contexts.

These specially commissioned essays cover the complete history of Rancière’s work and reflect its interdisciplinary reach. They span his early historical research of the 1960s and ’70s, his celebrated critique of pedagogy and his later political theory of dissensus and disagreement, as well as his ongoing analysis of literature and ‘the aesthetic regime of art’. Rancière’s resistance to psychoanalytic thinking is also explored, as are his most recent publications on film and film theory. Contributors include Tom Conley, Carolyn Steedman, Geneviève Fraisse, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jeremy Lane, and many more. The book also includes a brand new interview with Rancière, reflecting on his intellectual project and developing new lines of thought from his latest major work, Aisthesis.

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A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 2

by David Harvey

The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression shows no sign of ending, and Marx’s work remains key to any attempt to understand the ebb and flow of capitalist economies. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world’s foremost Marx scholars.

Based on his recent lectures, and following the success of his companion to the first volume of Capital, Harvey turns his attention to Volume 2, aiming to bring his depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and often-neglected text. Whereas Volume 1 focuses on production, Volume 2 looks at how value comes into being through the buying and selling of goods. Harvey also introduces elements from Volume 3 on credit and finance to help illustrate aspects of the contemporary crisis.

This is a must-read for anyone wanting a fuller understanding of Marx’s political economy. David Harvey’s video lecture course on Marx’s Capital can be found here.

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Natural:Mind

by Vilem Flusser

In Natural:Mind, published for the first time in 1979 in São Paulo, Brazil, Vilém Flusser explores the paradoxical relation between the concepts of nature and culture through a lively para-phenomenological analysis of natural and cultural phenomena. Can culture be considered natural and nature cultural? If culture is our natural habitat then do we not inhabit nature? These are only some of the questions that are raised in Natural:Mind in order to examine our continual redefinition of both terms and what that means for us existentially.

Always applying his fluid and imagistic Husserlian style of phenomenology, Flusser explores different perspectives and relations of objects from everyday life. The book is comprised of a series of essays based on close observations of familiar things such as paths, valleys, cows, meadows, trees, fingers, grass, the moon, and buttons. By focusing on things we mostly take for granted he manages not only to reveal some aspects of their real and obscured nature, but also to radically change the way we look at them. The ordinary cow will never be same again.

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The Birth of Territory

by Stuart Elden

Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth’s surface come from, and what kinds of complexities are hidden behind that seemingly straightforward definition?

The Birth of Territory provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, Stuart Elden examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding. Elden addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players—historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists—and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth’s surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

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Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy

by Andrew Bowie

Theodor Adorno’s reputation as a cultural critic has been well-established for some time, but his status as a philosopher remains unclear. In Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy Andrew Bowie seeks to establish what Adorno can contribute to philosophy today.
Adorno’s published texts are notably difficult and have tended to hinder his reception by a broad philosophical audience. His main influence as a philosopher when he was alive was, though, often based on his very lucid public lectures. Drawing on these lectures, both published and unpublished, Bowie argues that important recent interpretations of Hegel, and related developments in pragmatism, echo key ideas in Adorno’s thought. At the same time, Adorno’s insistence that philosophy should make the Holocaust central to the assessment of modern rationality suggests ways in which these approaches should be complemented by his preparedness to confront some of the most disturbing aspects of modern history. What emerges is a remarkably clear and engaging re-interpretation of Adorno’s thought, as well as an illuminating and original review of the state of contemporary philosophy.

Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy will be indispensable to students of Adorno’s work at all levels. This compelling book is also set to ignite debate surrounding the reception of Adorno’s philosophy and bring him into the mainstream of philosophical debate at a time when the divisions between analytical and European philosophy are increasingly breaking down.

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Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War

by Laura Sjoberg

Laura Sjoberg positions gender and gender subordination as key factors in the making and fighting of global conflict. Through the lens ofgender, she examines the meaning, causes, practices, and experiences of war, building a more inclusive approach to the analysis of violent conflict between states.

Considering war at the international, state, substate, and individual levels, Sjoberg’s feminist perspective elevates a number of causal variables in war decision-making. These include structural gender inequality, cycles of gendered violence, state masculine posturing, the often overlooked role of emotion in political interactions, gendered understandings of power, and states’ mistaken perception of their own autonomy and unitary nature. Gendering Global Conflict also calls attention to understudied spaces that can be sites of war, such as the workplace, the household, and even the bedroom. Her findings show gender to be a linchpin of even the most tedious and seemingly bland tactical and logistical decisions in violent conflict. Armed with that information, Sjoberg undertakes the task of redefining and reintroducing critical readings of war’s political, economic, and humanitarian dimensions, developing the beginnings of a feminist theory of war.

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The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights

by Robin Blackburn

The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas. For over three centuries enslavement promoted the rise of capitalism in the Atlantic world. The New World became the crucible for a succession of fateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racial enslavement, colonial rebellion, slave witness and slave resistance. Slave produce raised up empires, fostered new cultures of consumption and financed the breakthrough to an industrial order.

Not until the stirrings of a revolutionary age in the 1780s was there the first public challenge to the ‘peculiar institution’. An anti-slavery alliance then set the scene for great acts of emancipation in Haiti in 1804, Britain in 1833–8, the United States in the 1860s, and Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s. In The American Crucible, Robin Blackburn argues that the anti-slavery movement forged many of the ideals we live by today.

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[...After the Media]: News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century

By Siegfried Zielinski

The media are now redundant. In an overview of developments spanning the last seventy years, Siegfried Zielinski’s [... After the Media] discusses how the means of technology-based communication assumed a systemic character and how theory, art, and criticism were operative in this process. Media-explicit thinking is contrasted with media-implicit thought. Points of contact with an arts perspective include a reinterpretation of the artist Nam June Paik and an introduction to the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman. The essay ends with two appeals. In an outline of a precise philology of exact things, Zielinski suggests possibilities of how things could proceed after the media. With a Vademecum against psychopathia medialis in the form of a manifesto, the book advocates for a distinction to be made between online existence and offline being.

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Orgasmology

By Annamarie Jagose

For all its vaunted attention to sexuality, queer theory has had relatively little to say about sex, the material and psychic practices through which erotic gratification is sought. In Orgasmology, Annamarie Jagose takes orgasm as her queer scholarly object. From simultaneous to fake orgasms, from medical imaging to pornographic visualization, from impersonal sexual publics to domestic erotic intimacies, Jagose traces the career of orgasm across the twentieth century.

Along the way, she examines marriage manuals of the 1920s and 1930s, designed to teach heterosexual couples how to achieve simultaneous orgasms; provides a queer reading of behavioral modification practices of the 1960s and 1970s, aimed at transforming gay men into heterosexuals; and demonstrates how representations of orgasm have shaped ideas about sexuality and sexual identity.

A confident and often counterintuitive engagement with feminist and queer traditions of critical thought, Orgasmology affords fresh perspectives on not just sex, sexual orientation, and histories of sexuality, but also agency, ethics, intimacy, modernity, selfhood, and sociality. As modern subjects, we presume we already know everything there is to know about orgasm. This elegantly argued book suggests that orgasm still has plenty to teach us.

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Progressive Politics After the Crash: Governing from the Left

By Various.

Those who hoped the collapse of financial markets would usher in the end of neoliberalism and rehabilitate support for traditional social democratic policies programmes have been disappointed. It is not only the irrationality of markets which is the focus of public discontent, but the inefficiency of states and the inability of elected governments to humanise and control global market capitalism.

Despite recent successes, social democratic parties in the EU have become locked in a cycle of electoral under-performance. The crisis remedies of the Right appear more simple and direct in their diagnosis, casting the state as restrictive, wasteful and inefficient. Abstract theoretical debates on the Left about a ‘paradigm shift’ in Western capitalism in the aftermath of the crisis have had little traction.

So, in the aftermath of the 2008 crash prompted by the failure of US financial services conglomerate, Lehman Brothers, this book addresses a deceptively simple question: what is to be done? It makes the case for a new, post-crisis settlement harnessing the dynamic traditions of social liberalism and social democracy as the foundation for progressive reforms geared towards alleviating crisis aftershocks and addressing the deep-seated structural challenges afflicting western capitalist democracies.

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The Animal Question in Deconstruction

by Lynn Turner

Explores the political and poetic understanding of the deconstruction of the ‘animal question’How does deconstruction understand relations between humans and other animals? This collection of essays reveals that across Jacques Derrida’s work as a whole, as well as that of Hélène Cixous and Nicholas Royle, deconstruction has always addressed questions about animality. In this collection, for example, Cixous asks after human intervention between the death of a wild bird and the predation of a domestic cat. Kelly Oliver pursues Derrida’s analysis of what or whose gaze is at stake when a King oversees the autopsy of an elephant. Royle examines in what sense the vulnerable impressions made by the tunnelling of a mole might be thought of as the traces of a text. Re-examining how we relate to other animals has far-reaching implications for how we think of ourselves. Across this collection authors bring to attention the politics and the ethics of a less anthropocentric world. Even when this world is grasped.

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The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents

by Laura Frost
 

Aldous Huxley decried “the horrors of modern ‘pleasure,’” or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism’s signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss.

In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. She considers pop cultural phenomena and the rise of celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee against contemporary sociological, scientific, and philosophical writings on leisure and desire.

Throughout her study, Frost incorporates recent scholarship on material and visual culture and vernacular modernism, recasting the period’s high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists’ commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, Frost calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture.

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Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today

by Razmig Keucheyan

As the crisis of capitalism unfolds, the need for alternatives is felt ever more intensely. The struggle between radical movements and the forces of reaction will be merciless. A crucial battlefield, where the outcome of the crisis will in part be decided, is that of theory.

Over the last twenty-five years, radical intellectuals across the world have produced important and innovative ideas. The endeavour to transform the world without falling into the catastrophic traps of the past has been a common element uniting these new approaches.

This book—aimed at both the general reader and the specialist—offers the first global cartography of the expanding intellectual field of critical contemporary thought. More than thirty authors and intellectual currents of every continent are presented in a clear and succinct manner. A history of critical thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is also provided, helping situate current thinkers in a broader historical and sociological perspective.

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Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically

by Chantal Mouffe

Political conflict in our society is inevitable, and the results are often far from negative. How then should we deal with the intractable differences arising from complex modern culture?

Developing her groundbreaking political philosophy of agnostics—the search for a radical and plural democracy—Chantal Mouffe examines international relations, strategies for radical politics, the future of Europe and the politics of artistic practices. She shows that in many circumstances where no alternatives seem possible, agonistics offers a new road map for change. Engaging with cosmopolitanism, post-operaism, and theories of multiple modernities she argues in favor of a multipolar world with a real cultural and political pluralism.

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Bela Tarr, the Time After

by Jacques Ranciere

From Almanac of Fall (1984) to The Turin Horse (2011), renowned Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has followed the collapse of the communist promise. The time after is not the uniform and morose time of those who no longer believe in anything. It is the time when we are less interested in histories and their successes or failures than we are in the delicate fabric of time from which they are carved. It is the time of pure material events, against which belief will be measured for as long as life will sustain it.

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Ranciere and Film

Edited by Paul Bowman

Jacques Rancière rose to prominence as a radical egalitarian philosopher, political theorist, and historian. Recently, he has intervened in discourses on film theory and film studies. This collection boasts an impressive range of responses to and assessments of Rancière’s controversial and challenging contributions to film studies, featuring an original essay by the philosopher himself. Contributors include Nico Baumbach (Columbia University); (Rey Chow, Duke University); Bram Ieven (Utrecht University); Mónica Lopez Lerma (Helsinki University); Patricia MacCormack (University of East Anglia); Richard Stamp (Bath Spa University); and James Steintrager (University of California, Irvine).

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Being With the Without

By Various

In April 2012 a group of philosophers and scholars in cultural studies, intellectual history, Russian Language and Literature, and political science came to Strasbourg to meet Jean-Luc Nancy and discuss with him the relation between Being-With and Being-Without. At stake was nothing less than the question of community – of being-with – that came to be traced through alienation, communism, myth, natality, polis, sensibility, history and poetry, absences and presences. Being With the Without re-enacts these two days of intense discussions, hospitality, and laughter discovering a common ground of thought in a time defined by the loss of grounds.

Partaking in the conversation are Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Irina Sandomirskaja, Ludger Hagedorn, Victoria Fareld, Tora Lane Gustav Strandberg, and Krystof Kasprzak. The book also includes a tribute to Jean-Luc Nancy by Peter Schuback.

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America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth

By Henry Giroux

America’s latest war, according to renowned social critic Henry Giroux, is a war on youth. While this may seem counterintuitive in our youth-obsessed culture, Giroux lays bare the grim reality of how our educational, social, and economic institutions continually fail young people. Their systemic failure is the result of what Giroux identifies as “four fundamentalisms”: market deregulation, patriotic and religious fervor, the instrumentalization of education, and the militarization of society. We see the consequences most plainly in the decaying education system: schools are increasingly designed to churn out drone-like future employees, imbued with authoritarian values, inured to violence, and destined to serve the market. And those are the lucky ones. Young people who don’t conform to cultural and economic discipline are left to navigate the neoliberal landscape on their own; if they are black or brown, they are likely to become ensnared by a harsh penal system.

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Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis

By Nancy Fraser

Nancy Fraser’s major new book traces the feminist movement’s evolution since the 1970s and anticipates a new—radical and egalitarian—phase of feminist thought and action.

During the ferment of the New Left, “Second Wave” feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements that were questioning core features of capitalist society. But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a decline in its utopian energies and the rise of neoliberalism. Now, foreseeing a revival in the movement, Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to address the global economic crisis. Feminism can be a force working in concert with other egalitarian movements in the struggle to bring the economy under democratic control, while building on the visionary potential of the earlier waves of women’s liberation. This powerful new account is set to become a landmark of feminist thought.

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The Freud Scenario

by Jean-Paul Sartre

In 1958, the US director John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a scenario for a film about Sigmund Freud. Huston wanted Sartre to concentrate on the conflict-ridden period of Freud’s life when he abandoned hypnosis and invented psychoanalysis. The Freud Scenario, discovered in Sartre’s papers after his death, is the result—a deft portrait of a man engaged in a personal and intellectual struggle that would prove a turning point in twentieth-century thought.

Sartre did not regard this script as a diversion from his larger intellectual project. Freud’s preoccupations with female hysteria and the father relationship touched on major themes in his own work, and Loser Wins, The Family Idiot and Words, some of Sartre’s most celebrated publications, are all in some way derived from his work for Huston.
Written for a Hollywood audience, The Freud Scenario demonstrates that, in addition to a towering intellect, Sartre enjoyed a genuine popular touch. Already widely acclaimed in France, The Freud Scenario stands as a valuable testament to two of the most influential minds in modern history.

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Slavoj Zizek: Deleuze's Platonism: Ideas as Real

Recall the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of the flesh: when you see in front of you a voluptuous feminine body, imagine how it will look in a couple of decades - the dried skin, sagging breasts... (Or, even better, imagine what lurks now already beneath the skin: raw flesh and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food and excrements...) Far from enacting a return to the Real destined to break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure equals the escape from the Real, the Real announcing itself in the seductive appearance of the naked body. That is to say, in the opposition between the spectral appearance of the sexualized body and the repulsive body in decay, it is the spectral appearance with is the Real, and the decaying body which is reality - we take recourse to the decaying body in order to avoid the deadly fascination of the Real which threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance.

A "raw" Platonism would have claimed here that only the beautiful body fully materializes the Idea, and that a body in its material decay simply falls of from its Idea, is no longer its faithful copy. From a Deleuzian (and, here, Lacanian) view, on the contrary, the specter that attracts us is the Idea of the body as Real. This body is not the body in reality, but the virtual body in Deleuze's sense of the term: the incorporeal/immaterial body of pure intensities.

Deleuze's most radical anti-Hegelian argument concerns pure difference: Hegel is unable to think pure difference which is outside the horizon of identity/contradiction; Hegel conceives a radicalized difference as contradiction which, then, through its dialectical resolution, is again subsumed under identity. (Here, Deleuze is also opposed to Derrida who, from his perspective, remains caught within the vicious cycle of contradiction/identity, merely postponing resolution indefinitely.) And insofar as Hegel is the philosopher of actuality/actualization, insofar as, for him, the "truth" of a potentiality is revealed in its actualization, Hegel's inability to think pure difference equals his inability to think the virtual in its proper dimension, as a possibility which already qua possibility possesses its own reality: pure difference is not actual, it does not concern different actual properties of a thing or among things, its status is purely virtual, it is a difference which takes place at its purest precisely when nothing changes in actuality, when, in actuality, the SAME thing repeats itself. - Effectively, it may appear that it is only Deleuze who formulates the truly post-Hegelian program of thinking difference: the Derridean "opening" which emphasizes the endless difference, the dissemination that cannot ever be sublated/reappropriated, etc., remains within the Hegelian framework, merely "opening" it up...

But, here, the Hegelian counter-argument would have been: is then the "pure" virtual difference not the very name for actual self-identity? Is it not CONSTITUTIVE of actual identity? More precisely, in the terms of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, pure difference is the virtual support/condition of actual identity: an entity is perceived as "(self-)identical" when (and only when) its virtual support is reduced to a pure difference. In Lacanese, pure difference concerns the supplement of the virtual object (Lacan's objet a); its most plastic experience is that of a sudden change in (our perception of) an object which, with regard to its positive qualities, remains the same: "although nothing changes, the thing all of a sudden seemed totally different" - as Deleuze would have put it, it is the thing's intensity which changes. (For Lacan, the theoretical problem/task is here to distinguish between the Master-Signifier and objet a which both refer to the abyssal X in the object beyond its positive properties.) As such, pure difference is closer to antagonism than to the difference between two positive social groups one of which is to be annihilated. The universalism that sustains an antagonistic struggle is not exclusive of anyone, which is why the highest triumph of the antagonistic struggle is not the destruction of the enemy, but the explosion of the "universal brotherhood" in which agents of the opposite camp change sides and join us (recall the proverbial scenes of police or military units joining the demonstrators). It is in such explosion of enthusiastic all-encompassing brotherhood from which no one is in principle excluded, that the difference between "us" and "enemy" as positive agents is reduced to a PURE formal difference.

This brings us to the topic of difference, repetition, and change (in the sense of the rise of something really new). Deleuze's thesis according to which New and repetition are not opposed, i.e., according to which New arises only from repetition, is to be read against the background of the difference between the Virtual and the Actual. To put it directly: changes which concerns only the actual aspect of things are only changes within the existing frame, not the emergences of something really New - New only emerges when the virtual support of the Actual changes, and this change occurs precisely in the guise of a repetition in which a thing remains the same in its actuality. In other words, things really change not when a transforms itself into B, but when, while A remains exactly the same with regard to its actual properties, it imperceptibly "totally changes"...

The Lacanian Real, in its opposition to the Symbolic, has ultimately nothing whatsoever to do with the standard empiricist (or phenomenological, or historicist, or Lebensphilosophie, for that reason) topic of the wealth of reality that resists formal structures, that cannot be reduced to its conceptual determinations - language is grey, reality is green... The Lacanian Real is, on the contrary, even more "reductionist" that any symbolic structure: we touch it when we subtract from a symbolic field all the wealth of its differences, reducing it to a minimum of antagonism. Lacan himself is here not beyond reproach, since he gets sometimes seduced by the rhizomatic wealth of language beyond (or, rather, beneath) the formal structure that sustains it. It is in this sense that, in the last decade of his teaching, he deployed the notion of lalangue (sometimes simply translated as "llanguage") which stands for language as the space of illicit pleasures that defy any normativity: the chaotic multitude of homonymies, word-plays, "irregular" metaphoric links and resonances... Productive as this notion is, one should be aware of its limitations. Many commentators have noted that Lacan's last great literary reading, that of Joyce to whom his late seminar (XXIII: Le sinthome [1]) is dedicated, is not at the level of his previous great readings (Hamlet, Antigone, Claudel's Coufontaine-trilogy). There is effectively something fake in Lacan's fascination with late Joyce, with Finnegan's Wake as the latest version of the literary Gesamtkunstwerk with its endless wealth of lalangue in which not only the gap between singular languages, but the very gap between linguistic meaning and jouissance seems overcome and the rhizome-like jouis-sense (enjoyment-in-meaning: enjoy-meant) proliferates in all directions. The true counterpart to Joyce is, of course, Samuel Becket: after his early period in which he more or less wrote some variations on Joyce, the "true" Becket constituted himself through a true ethical act, a CUT, a rejection of the Joycean wealth of enjoy-meant, and the ascetic turn towards a "minimal difference," towards a minimalization, "subtraction," of the narrative content and of language itself (this line is most clearly discernible in his masterpiece, the trilogy Molloy - Malone Dies - L'innomable). So what is the "minimal difference" - the purely parallax gap - that sustains Becket's mature production? One is tempted to propose the thesis that it is the very difference between French and English: as is known, Becket wrote most of his mature works in French (not his mother tongue), and the, desperate at the low quality of translations, translated them himself into English, and these translations are not mere close translations, but effectively a different text.

It is because of this "minimalist" - purely formal and insubstantial - status of the Real that, for Lacan, repetition precedes repression - or, as Deleuze put it succinctly: "We do not repeat because we repress, we repress because we repeat." (DR-105) It is not that, first, we repress some traumatic content, and then, since we are unable to remember it and thus to clarify our relationship to it, this content continues to haunt us, repeating itself in disguised forms. If the Real is a minimal difference, then repetition (that establishes this difference) is primordial; the primacy of repression emerges with the "reification" of the Real into a Thing that resists symbolization - only then, it appears that the excluded/repressed Real insists and repeats itself. The Real is primordially nothing but the gap that separates a thing from itself, the gap of repetition.

The consequence of this is also the inversion in the relationship between repetition and remembrance. Freud's famous motto "what we do not remember, we are compelled to repeat" should thus be turned around: what we are unable to repeat, we are haunted with and are compelled to memorize. The way to get rid of a past trauma is not to rememorize it, but to fully REPEAT it in the Kierkegaardian sense. What is the Deleuzian "pure difference" at its purest, if we may put it in this tautological way? It is the purely virtual difference of an entity which repeats itself as totally identical with regard to its actual properties: "there are significant differences in the virtual intensities expressed in our actual sensations. These differences do not correspond to actual recognizable differences. That the shade of pink has changed in an identifiable way is not all-important. It is that the change is a sign of a re-arrangement of an infinity of other actual and virtual relations." [2] Is such a pure difference not what takes place in the repetition of the same actual melodic line in Robert Schumann's "Humoresque"? This piece is to be read against the background of the gradual loss of the voice in Schumann's songs: it is not a simple piano piece, but a song without the vocal line, with the vocal line reduced to silence, so that all we effectively hear is the piano accompaniment. This is how one should read the famous "inner voice /innere Stimme/" added by Schumann (in the written score) as a third line between the two piano lines, higher and lower: as the vocal melodic line which remains a non-vocalized "inner voice" (which exists only as Augenmusik, music for the eyes only, in the guise of written notes). This absent melody is to be reconstructed on the basis of the fact that the first and third levels (the right and the left hand piano lines) do not relate to each other directly, i.e. their relationship is not that of an immediate mirroring: in order to account for their interconnection, one is thus compelled to (re)construct a third, "virtual" intermediate level (melodic line) which, for structural reasons, cannot be played. Schumann brings this procedure of absent melody to an apparently absurd self-reference when, later in the same fragment of Humoresque, he repeats the same two effectively played melodic lines, yet this time the score contains no third absent melodic line, no inner voice - what is absent here is the absent melody, i.e. absence itself. How are we to play these notes when, at the level of what is effectively to be played, they exactly repeat the previous notes? The effectively played notes are deprived only of what is not there, of their constitutive lack, or, to refer to the Bible, they lose even that what they never had. The true pianist should thus have the savoir-faire to play the existing, positive, notes in such a way that one would be cable to discern the echo of the accompanying non-played "silent" virtual notes or their absence... This, then, is pure difference: the nothing-actual, the virtual background, which accounts for the difference of the two melodic lines.

This logic of virtual difference can also be discerned in another paradox, namely the above mentioned cinema version of Billy Bathgate is basically a failure, but an interesting one: a failure which nonetheless evokes in the viewer the specter of the much better novel. However, when one then goes to read the novel on which the film is based, one is disappointed - this is NOT the novel the film evoked as the standard with regard to which it failed. The repetition (of a failed novel in the failed film) thus gives rise to a third, purely virtual, element, the better novel. This is an exemplary case of what Deleuze deploys in the crucial pages of his Difference and Repetition:

while it may seem that the two presents are successive, at a variable distance apart in the series of reals, in fact they form, rather, two real series which coexist in relation to a virtual object of another kind, one which constantly circulates and is displaced in them /.../. Repetition is constituted not from one present to another, but between the two coexistent series that these presents form in function of the virtual object (object = x).(DR-104-105)

With regard to Billy Bathgate the film does not "repeat" the novel on which it is based; rather, they both "repeat" the unrepeatable virtual x, the "true" novel whose specter is engendered in the passage from the actual novel to the film. This virtual point of reference, although "unreal," is in a way more real than reality: it is the ABSOLUTE point of reference of the failed real attempts. This is how, in the perspective of the materialist theology, the divine emerges from the repetition of terrestrial material elements, as their "cause" retroactively posited by them. Deleuze is right to refer to Lacan here: this "better book" is what Lacan calls objet petit a, the object-cause of desire that "one cannot recapture in the present, except by capturing it in its consequences," the two really-existing books.

The underlying movement is here more complex than it may appear. It is not that we should simply conceive the starting point (the novel) as an "open work," full of possibilities which can be deployed later, actualized in later versions; or - even worse - that we should conceive the original work as a pre-text which can later be incorporated in other con-texts and given a meaning totally different from the original one. What is missing here is the retroactive, backwards, movement that was first described by Henri Bergson, a key reference for Deleuze. In his "Two Sources of Morality and Religion", Bergson describes the strange sensations he experienced on August 4 1914, when war was declared between France and Germany: "In spite of my turmoil, and although a war, even a victorious one, appeared to me as a catastrophy, I experienced what /William/ James spoke about, a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to the concret: who would have thought that such a formidable event can emerge in reality with so little fuss?" [3] Crucial is here the modality of the break between before and after: before its outburst, the war appeared to Bergson "simultaneously probable and impossible: a complex and contradictory notion which persisted to the end" [4]; after its outburst, it all of a sudden become real AND possible, and the paradox resides in this retroactive appearance of probability:

I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time. However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or, rather, at every moment, the possible insert itself there. Insofar as inpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past: this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible; but it is only at the precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always have been, and this is why I say that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once this reality emerges. [5]

THIS is what takes place in the example of Billy Bathgate: the film inserts back into the novel the possibility of a different, much better, novel. And do we not encounter a similar logic in the relationship between Stalinism and Leninism? Here also, THREE moments are in play: Lenin's politics before the Stalinist takeover; Stalinist politics; the specter of "Leninism" retroactively generated by Stalinism (in its official Stalinist version, but ALSO in the version critical of Stalinism, like when, in the process of "de-Stalinization" in the USSR, the motto evoked was that of the "return to the original Leninist principles"). One should therefore stop the ridiculous game of opposing the Stalinist terror to the "authentic" Leninist legacy betrayed by the Stalinism: "Leninism" is a thoroughly Stalinist notion. The gesture of projecting the emancipatory-utopian potential of Stalinism backwards, into a preceding time, signals the incapacity of the thought to endure the "absolute contradiction," the unbearable tension, inherent to the Stalinist project itself. [6] It is therefore crucial to distinguish "Leninism" (as the authentic core of Stalinism) from the actual political practice and ideology of Lenin's period: the actual greatness of Lenin is NOT the same as the Stalinist authentic myth of Leninism.

And the irony is that this logic of repetition, elaborated by Deleuze, THE anti-Hegelian, is at the very core of the Hegelian dialectics: it relies on the properly dialectical relationship between temporal reality and the eternal Absolute. The eternal Absolute is the immobile point of reference around which temporal figurations circulate, their presupposition; however, precisely as such, it is posited by these temporal figurations, since it does not pre-exist them: it emerges in the gap between the first and the second one - in the case of Billy Bathgate, between the novel and its repetition in the film. Or, back to Schumann's Humoresque, the eternal absolute is the third unplayed melodic line, the point of reference of the two lines played in reality: it is absolute, but a fragile one - if the two positive lines are played wrongly, it disappears... This is what one is tempted to call "materialist theology": temporal succession creates eternity.

The Deleuzian notion of sign can only be properly grasped against the background of his redefinition of what is a problem. Commonsense tells us that there are true and false solutions to every problems; for Deleuze, on the contrary, there are no definitive solutions to problems, solutions are just repeated attempts to deal with the problem, with its impossible-real. Problems themselves, not solutions, are true or false. Each solution not only reacts to "its" problem, but retroactively redefines it, formulating it from within its own specific horizon. Which is why problem is universal and solutions/answers are particular.

Deleuze is here unexpectedly closer to Hegel: for Hegel, say, the Idea of State is a problem, and each specific form of the state (Ancient republic, feudal monarchy, modern democracy...) proposes a solution to this problem, redefining the problem itself. And, precisely, the passage to the next "higher" stage of the dialectical process occurs when, instead of continuing to search for a solution, we problematize the problem itself, abandoning its terms - say, when, instead of continuing to search for a "true" State, we drop the very reference to State and look for a communal existence beyond State.

Problem is thus not only "subjective," not just epistemological, a problem for the subject who tries to solve it; it is stricto sensu ontological, inscribed into the thing itself: the structure of reality is "problematic." That is to say, actual reality can only be grasped as a series of answers to a virtual problems - say, in Deleuze's reading of biology, the development of eyes can only be grasped as attempted solution at the problem of how to deal with light. And this brings us to sign - actual reality appears as "sign" when it is perceived as an answer to virtual problem:

Neither the problem nor the question is a subjective determination marking a moment of insufficiency in knowledge. Problematic structure is part of objects themselves, allowing them to be grasped as signs (DR-63-4)

This explains the strange way Deleuze opposes signs and representations: for the common sense, a mental representation directly reproduces the way a thing is, while a sign just points towards it, designating it with a (more or less) arbitrary signifier. (In a representation of a table, I "see directly" a table, while its sign just points towards the table.) For Deleuze, on the contrary, representations are mediate, while signs are direct, and the task of a creative thought is that of "making movement itself a work, without interpositions; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations" (DR-16).

Representations are figures of objects as objective entities deprived of their virtual support/background, and we pass from representation to sign when we are able to discern in an object that which points towards its virtual ground, towards the problem with regard to which it is an answer. To put it succinctly, every answer is a sign of its problem. Does Deleuze's argument against the (Hegelian) negative not hold only if we reduce the negative to the negation of a pre-existing positive identity? What about a negativity which is in itself positive, giving, "generative"?

For a Deleuzian Christology. How are we to grasp the (often noted) weird impassivity of the figure of Christ, its "sterility"? What if Christ is an Event in the Deleuzian sense - an occurrence of pure individuality without proper causal power? Which is why Christ suffers, but in a thoroughly impassive way. Christ is "individual" in the Deleuzian sense: he is a pure individual, not characterized by positive properties which would make him "more" than an ordinary human, i.e., the difference between Christ and other humans is purely virtual - back to Schumann, Christ is, at the level of actuality, the same as other humans, only the unwritten "virtual melody" that accompanies him is added. And in the Holy Spirit, we get this "virtual melody" in its own: the Holy Spirit is a collective field of pure virtuality, with no causal power of its own. Christ's death and resurrection is the death of the actual person which confronts us directly with the ("resurrected") virtual field that sustained it. The Christian name for this virtual force is "love": when Christ says to his worried followers after his death "when there will be love between two of you, I will be there," he thereby asserts his virtual status.

Deleuzian repetition "is not an objective fact but an act - a form of behavior towards that which cannot be repeated" (JW-33). This is why there is asymmetry between the two levels - actuality of facts and virtuality of pure differences - is radical: not only does the repetition of pure differences underlie all actual identities (as we have seen in the case of Schumann), i.e., not only do we encounter pure virtual difference at its purest in actual identity; it is also that "the repetition of actual identities is disguised in any determinate idea of pure differences" (JW-28): there is no "pure" difference outside actuality, the virtual sphere of differences only persists-insists as a shadow accompanying actual identities and their interactions. Again, as in the case of Billy Bathgate the virtual specter ("Idea") of the true novel arises only through actual repetition of the actual novel in the film.

The starting point of Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism" is that there is always a hidden virtual aspect to any given determined/actual object or process: actual things are not ontologically "complete"; in order to get a complete view of them, we must add to it its virtual supplement. This move from an actual given thing to its virtual conditions is the transcendental move, the deployment of the transcendental conditions of the given. However, this does not mean that the virtual somehow produces, causes, or generates, the actual: when Deleuze talks about genesis (of the actual out of the virtual), he does not mean temporal-evolutionary genesis, the process of spatio-temporal becoming of a thing, but a "genesis without dynamism, evolving necessarily in the element of a supra-historicity, a static genesis" (DR-183). This static character of the virtual field finds its most radical expression in Deleuze's notion of a pure past: not the past into which things present pass, but an absolute past "where all events, including those that have sunk without trace, are stored and remembered as their passing away" (JW-94), a virtual past which already contains also things which are still present (a present can become past because in a way it is already, it can perceive itself as part of the past ("what we are doing now is (will have been) history"): "It is with respect to the pure element of the past, understood as the past in general, as an a priori past, that a given former present is reproducible and the present present is able to reflect itself." (DR-81) Does this mean that this pure past involves a thoroughly deterministic notion of the universe in which everything to happen (to come), all actual spatio-temporal deployment, is already part of an immemorial/atemporal virtual network? No, and for a very precise reason: because "the pure past must be all the past but must also be amenable to change through the occurrence of any new present" (JW-96). It was none other than T.S.Eliot, this great conservative, who first clearly formulated this link between our dependence on tradition and our power to change the past: tradition

cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of ¾sthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. [7]

When Eliot writes that, when judging a living poet, "you must set him among the dead," he formulates precisely an example of Deleuze's pure past. And when he writes that "the existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted," he no less clearly formulates the paradoxical link between the completeness of the past and our capacity to change it retroactively: precisely because the pure past is complete, each new work re-arranges its entire balance. Recall Borges' precise formulation of the relationship between Kafka and the multitude of his precursors, from old Chinese authors to Robert Browning: "Kafka's idiosyncrasy, in greater or lesser degree, is present in each of these writings, but if Kafka had not written we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. /.../ each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." [8] The properly dialectical solution of the dilemma of "Is it really there, in the source, or did we only read it into the source?" is thus: it is there, but we can only perceive and state this retroactively, from today's perspective.

Here, Peter Hallward falls short in his otherwise excellent Out of This World, where he stresses only the aspect of the pure past as the virtual field in which the fate of all actual events is sealed in advance, since "everything is already written" in it. At this point where we view reality sub specie aeternitatis, absolute freedom coincides with absolute necessity and its pure automatism: to be free means to let oneself freely flow in/with the substantial necessity. This topic reverberates even in today's cognitivist debates on the problem of free will. Compatibilists like Daniel Dennett have an elegant solution to the incompatibilists' complaints about determinism (see Dennett's Freedom Evolves): when incompatibilists complain that our freedom cannot be combined with the fact that all our acts are part of the great chain of natural determinism, they secretly make an unwarranted ontological assumption: first, they assume that we (the Self, the free agent) somehow stand OUTSIDE reality, and then go to complain how they feel oppressed by the notion that reality with its determinism controls them totally. This is what is wrong with the notion of us being "imprisoned" by the chains of the natural determinism: we thereby obfuscate the fact that we are PART OF reality, that the (possible, local) conflict between our "free" striving and external reality resisting to it is a conflict inherent to reality itself. That is to say, there is nothing "oppressive" or "constraining" about the fact that our innermost strivings are (pre)determined: when we feel thwarted in our freedom by the constraining pressure of external reality, there must be something in us, some desires, strivings, which are thus thwarted, and where should these strivings come if not from this same reality? Our "free will" does not in some mysterious way "disturb the natural course of things," it is part and parcel of this course. For us to be "truly" and "radically" free, this would entail that there would be no positive content we would want to impose as our free act - if we want nothing "external" and particular/given to determine our behavior, then "this would involve being free of every part of ourselves"(Fearn 24). When a determinist claims that our free choice is "determined," this does not mean that our free will is somehow constrained, that we are forced to act AGAINST our free will - what is "determined" is the very thing that we want to do "freely," i.e., without being thwarted by external obstacles. - So, back to Hallward: while he is right to emphasize that, for Deleuze, freedom "isn't a matter of human liberty but of liberation from humanity" (139), of fully submerging oneself into the creative flux of the absolute Life, his political conclusion from this seems too fast:

The immediate political implication of such a position /.../ is clear enough: since a free mode or monad is simply one that has eliminated its resistance to the sovereign will that works through it, so then it follows that the more absolute the sovereign's power, the more 'free' are those subject to it. (139)

But does Hallward not ignore the retroactive movement on which Deleuze also insists, i.e., how this eternal pure past which fully determines us is itself subjected to retroactive change? We are thus simultaneously less free and more free than we think: we are thoroughly passive, determined by and dependent on the past, but we have the freedom to define the scope of this determination, i.e., to (over)determine the past which will determine us. Deleuze is here unexpectedly close to Kant, for whom I am determined by causes, but I (can) retroactively determine which causes will determine me: we, subjects, are passively affected by pathological objects and motivations; but, in a reflexive way, we ourselves have the minimal power to accept (or reject) being affected in this way, i.e., we retroactively determine the causes allowed to determine us, or, at least, the MODE of this linear determination. "Freedom" is thus inherently retroactive: at its most elementary, it is not simply a free act which, out of nowhere, starts a new causal link, but a retroactive act of endorsing which link/sequence of necessities will determine me. Here, one should add a Hegelian twist to Spinoza: freedom is not simply "recognized/known necessity", but recognized/assumed necessity, the necessity constituted/actualized through this recognition. So when Deleuze refers to Proust's description of Vinteuil's music that haunts Swann - "as if the performers not so much played the little phrase as executed the rites necessary for it to appear" -, he is evoking the necessary illusion: generating the sense-event is experienced as ritualistic evocation of a pree-existing event, as if the event was already there, waiting for our call in its virtual presence.

What directly resonates in this topic is, of course, the Protestant motif of predestination: far from being a reactionary theological motif, predestination is a key element of the materialist theory of sense, on condition that we read it along the lines of the Deleuzian opposition between the virtual and the actual. That is to say, predestination does not mean that our fate is sealed in an actual text existng from eternity in the divine mind; the texture which predestines us belonmgs to the purely virtual eternal past which, as such, can be retroactively rewritten by our act. This, perhaps, would have been the ultimate meaning of the singularity Christ's incarnation: it is an ACT which radically changes our destiny. Prior to Christ, we were determined by Fate, caught in the cycle of sin and its payment, while Christ's erasing of our past sins means precisely that his sacrifice changes our virtual past andf thus sets us free. When Deleuze writes that Èmy wound existed before me; I was born to embody it,Ç does this variation on the theme of the Cheshire cat and its smile from Alice in Wonderland (the cat was born to embody its smile) not provide a perfect formula of Christ's sacrifice: Christ was born to embody his wound, to be crucified? The problem is the literal teleological reading of this proposition: as if the actual deeds of a person merely actualize its atemporal-eternal fate inscribed in its virtual idea:

Caesar's only real task is to become worthy of the events he has been created to embody. Amor fati. What Caesar actually does adds nothing to what he virtually is. When Caesar actually crosses the Rubicon this involves no deliberation or choice since it is simply part of the entire, immediate expression of Caesarness, it simply unrolls or 'unfolds something that was encompassed for all times in the notion of Caesar. (Hallward 54)

However, what about the retroactivity of a gesture which (re)constitutes this past itself? This, perhaps, is the most succinct definition of what an authentic ACT is: in our ordinary activity, we effectively justy follow the (virtual-fantasmatic) coordinates of our identity, while an act proper is the paradox of an actual move which (retroactively) changes the very virtual ÈtranscendentalÇ coordinates of its agent's being - or, in Freudian terms, which does not only change the actuality of our world, but also "moves its underground". We have thus a kind of reflexive "folding back of the condition onto the given it was the condition for" (JW-109): while the pure past is the transcendental condition for our acts, our acts do not only create new actual reality, they also retroactively change this very condition. This brings us to the central problem of Deleuze's ontology: how are the virtual and the actual related? "Actual things express Ideas but are not caused by them."(JW-200) The notion of causality is limited to the interaction of actual things and processes; on the other hand, this interaction also causes virtual entities (sense, Ideas): Deleuze is not an idealist, Sense is for him always an ineffective sterile shadow accompanying actual things. What this means is that, for Deleuze, (transcendental) genesis and causality are totally opposed: they move at different levels:

Actual things have an identity, but virtual ones do not, they are pure variations. An actual thing must change - become something different - in order to express something. Whereas, the expressed virtual thing does not change - only its relation to other virtual things, other intensities and Ideas changes. (JW-200)

How does this relation change? Only through the changes in actual things which express Ideas, since the entire generative power lies in actual things: Ideas belong to the domain of Sense which is "only a vapor which plays at the limit of things and words"; as such, Sense is "the Ineffectual, a sterile incorporeal deprived of its generative powers" (DR-156). Think about a group of dedicated individuals fighting for the Idea of Communism: in order to grasp their activity, we have to take into account the virtual Idea. But this Idea is in itself sterile, has no proper causality: all causality lies in the individuals who "express" it.

The gist of Deleuze's critique of Aristotle, of his notion of specific difference, is that it privileged difference to identity: specific difference always presupposes the identity of a genre in which opposed species co-exist. However, what about the "Hegelian complication" here? What about a specific difference which defines the genre itself, a difference of species which coincides with the difference between genus and species, thus reducing the genus itself to one of its species?

Bodies without organs, organs without bodies: as Deleuze emphasizes, what he is fighting against are not organs but ORGANISM, the articulation of a body into a hierarchic-harmonious Whole of organs, each "at its place," with its function: "the BwO is in no way the contrary of the organs. Its enemies are not organs. The enemy is the organism." [9] He is fighting corporatism/organicism. For him, Spinoza's substance is the ultimate BwO: the non-hierarchic space in which a chaotic multitude (of organs?), all equal (univocity of being), float... Nonetheless, there is a strategic choice made here: why BwO, why not (also) OwB? Why not Body as the space in which autonomous organs freely float? Is it because "organs" evoke a function within a wider Whole, subordination to a goal? But does this very fact not make their autonomization, OwB, all the more subversive?

Notes:

[1] Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII: Le sinthome, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005.

[2] James Williams, Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: a Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2003, p. 27.

[3] Henri Bergson, Oeuvres, Paris: PUF, 1991, p. 1110-1111.

[4] Bergson, ibid.

[5] Bergson, ibid.

[6] One of the few historians ready to confront this excruciating tension is Sheila Fitzpatrick, who pointed out that the year 1928 was a shattering turning point, a true second revolution, not any kind of "Thermidor," but rather the consequent radicalization of the October Revolution. See Stalinism. New Directions, ed. by Sheila Fitzpatrick, London: Routledge, 2001.

[7] T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," originally published in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, (1922).

[8] Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions: 1937-52, New York: Washington Square Press, 1966, p. 113.

[9] Gilles Deleuze - Felix Guattari, Mille plateaux, Paris: Les editions de Minuit, 1980, p. 196.

Deleuze's Platonism: Ideas as Real - lacan.com (May)