Theory & Event

The essays in 14.1 grapple with different modes of connection and their repercussions for politics. To what extent are the possibilities open to us—possibilities of solidarity, reconciliation, and acknowledgement—accompanied by pressures toward division and judgment that we may attempt to avoid or disavow? And how do these attempts inspire, configure, and drive the political and/in/as its relations to ethics, law, movements, and film?

Our first piece, Anne Norton's "The Red Shoes: Islam and the Limits of Solidarity in Cixous's Mon Algériance," reads Hélène Cixous's "Mon Algériance," a "public intellectual" type essay that first appeared in 1997 in which Cixous reflects on her Algerian past. Norton emphasizes Cixous's refusal of Algerian identity, her disavowal of her North African birth in the context of continued brutality and discrimination against Muslims in France. A double displacement, a double refusal—Norton sees in Cixous's écriture féminine not only a rejection of Algeria as a site of male violence but also a failure to find and claim a shared Muslim and Jewish history. Rather than offering solidarity, Cixous colludes with dispossession.

Roger Berkowitz's essay, "Bearing Logs on Our Shoulders: Reconciliation, Non-Reconciliation, and the Building of a Common World," engages the first seven pages of Hannah Arendt's as of yet untranslated diary, Denktagebuch, penned after her first encounter with Martin Heidegger upon returning to Germany in 1950. Berkowitz argues that these pages show the primacy of reconciliation—as opposed to forgiveness or revenge—in Arendt's conception of judgment. Indeed, he concludes that only through the concept of reconciliation can we understand Arendt's political project of world-building.

George Shulman's "Acknowledgment and Disavowal as an Idiom for Theorizing Politics" explores the political limits of the ethical turn in contemporary political theory. Looking specifically to the works of Judith Butler and Stanley Cavell, Shulman sees in the embrace of ethics a disavowal of politics. His hope is to complicate the relationship between disavowal and acknowledgement so as to also complicate the distinction between politics and ethics.

Our fourth essay, co-authored by Amy Swiffen and Catherine Kellogg and entitled "Pleasure and Political Subjectivity: Fetishism from Freud to Agamben," invokes Freud's interest in sexual fetishism in order to explore Giorgio Agamben's utopianism regarding the relationship between law and action. Swiffen and Kellogg use Freud's insights on the fetishistic displacement of desire to account for the place of political action (or lack thereof) in Agamben's approach to contemporary debates concerning law and sovereignty.

Jason Demers's essay, "An American Excursion: Deleuze and Guattari from New York to Chicago," adopts Bruno Latour's assemblage theory in order to describe and account for the intellectual history that surrounds the American arrival of the works of Deleuze and Guattari. Specifically, Demers shows how Deleuze and Guattari's theories were both informed by and contributed to anarchist and liberationist movements growing out of New York at the turn of the seventies. More than intellectual history, Demers's essay presents the groundwork for a new methodological approach to thinking of the ways in which ideas travel among and beyond territorial boundaries.

Our final essay, by David Denny and entitled "On the Politics of the Drive: A Reading of The Hurt Locker," examines the highly acclaimed film by Katharine Bigelow at the level of the kind of sensorial immersion it affords. His approach is to read The Hurt Locker under the lens of a Hitchockian Blot in order show how the film does not index the real of war, but rather the conditions of its ideological-political matrix.

Issue 14.1 concludes with six book reviews: Peter Y. Paik of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee reviews Marc Abélès's The Politics of Survival (Duke University Press, 2010); Elisabeth Anker of George Washington University reviews Robin Truth Goodman's Policing Narratives and the State of Terror (SUNY Press, 2010) and Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press, 2008); Sophie Bourgault of the University of Ottawa reviews Michel Foucault's Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France 1982-1983 (Gallimard/Seuil, 2008), Le courage de la vérité. Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France 1984 (Gallimard/Seuil, 2009) and, The Government of Self and Other. Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Kathleen R. Arnold of DePaul University in Chicago reviews Paul Apostolidis's Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrants Can Teach America about Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Michael J. Shapiro of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa reviews Luis Lobo-Guerrero's Insuring Security: Biopolitics, Security and Risk (Routledge, 2011); and finally Brenna Bhandar of Kent Law School and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller University of the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa review Catherine Malabou's Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction and Deconstruction (Columbia University Press, 2010).