POSTMODERN CULTURE

Sungyong Ahn is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Communications Research (ICR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published research on algorithmic culture, attention economy, and media theory in media studies journals. His research interests include wearable health devices, videogames, self-tracking technologies, and their affective dimensions. Ian Balfour is Professor Emeritus […]

Parisa Vaziri (bio) A review of Warren, Calvin. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke UP, 2018. Plumbing Frantz Fanon’s frequently cited but not always well elaborated pronouncement that “ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the Black man” (90), Calvin Warren’s Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation brings to bear a […]

Janet Neary (bio) A review of Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Duke UP, 2018. Stolen Life is the second book in Fred Moten’s recent series, consent not to be a single being, published within a year by Duke University Press. Like the other books in the series, Black and Blur and The Universal Machine, Stolen Life […]

Robert McRuer (bio) A review of Robbins, Bruce. The Beneficiary, Duke University Press, 2017. Bruce Robbins opens The Beneficiary with a 1948 State Department memo written by George F. Kennan. The memo acknowledges a stark disparity between the United States and the rest of the world (the U.S. held 50% of the world’s wealth but […]

Will Kujala (bio) A Review of Lambert, Gregg. Philosophy After Friendship: Deleuze’s Conceptual Personae. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Philosophy after Friendship intervenes productively in our contemporary political and philosophical moment. Lambert’s central thesis is that the contemporary world, precisely because of its intensification and disorientation of war and violence, has opened a space for […]

Ian Balfour (bio) A review of Karatani, Kōjin. Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel, Hiroki Yoshikuni, and Darwin H. Tsen, Oxford UP, 2017. Kōjin Karatani has long been a distinctive, powerful voice in critical theory on the global or quasi-global stage, a key mediator between Eastern and Western thought, […]

Sungyong Ahn (bio) Abstract The Internet of Things, as the object-oriented reconstruction of the traditional internet, is characterized by its smart objects freely inter-operating without being necessarily under human control. Re-building the internet’s information economy from the data captured by and communicated through these autonomous objects, the IoT operationalizes a sort of flat ontology, which […]

Tamas Nagypal (bio) Through the comparative analysis of Double Indemnity (1944), Body Heat (1981), and The Usual Suspects (1995), this paper argues that what Michel Foucault called the neoliberal entrepreneur of the self has its prototype in the subject constructed by the classical discourse of film noir. While in the genre’s early form the individual’s […]

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.–Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles” We live in […]

Eric Aldieri is a graduate student in Philosophy at DePaul University. He works primarily on poststructuralist thought and feminist theory, focusing on convalescence and relational ontology. Vicki Kirby is Professor of Sociology at The University of New South Wales, Sydney. The motivating question behind her research is the puzzle of the nature/culture, body/mind, body/technology division, […]

Tom Roach (bio)Bryant University A review of Tuhkanen, Mikko. The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani. State U of New York P, 2018. Early in Candide, or Optimism, Voltaire’s classic send-up of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s metaphysics (or perversions thereof), the windbag philosopher Doctor Pangloss explains the “sufficient reason” for his syphilitic condition. Responding to the naïve […]

David Maruzzella (bio)DePaul University A review of Herzogenrath, Bernd, editor. Film as Philosophy. Minnesota UP, 2017. As its title suggests, Film as Philosophy seeks to recast the relationship between philosophy and film. Against the once-dominant psychoanalytic and semiotic theories of film, the fifteen essays in this edited volume attempt to displace the traditional hierarchy implicit […]

Eric Aldieri (bio)DePaul University A review of Ruti, Mari. The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Columbia UP, 2017. The term queer theory is usually attributed to Teresa de Lauretis, who used it at a 1990 conference on gay and sexuality studies at UC Santa Cruz. Judith Butler, David Halperin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, […]

Mauro Senatore (bio)Durham University Abstract This article tests the hypothesis that the history of life can be told only by assuming the ultra-transcendental conception of life as leaving a trace in the world. It draws together two moments in the work of Jacques Derrida that are chronologically distant and yet develop that hypothesis and its […]

Erin Obodiac (bio)University of California, Irvine Abstract In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida shows that a certain arche-writing of the trace is not only in play with any mode of language—spoken, written, or graphic—but is also a principle of “life”—whether human, non-human, cybernetic, or genetic. Catherine Malabou’s forays into new biologies of plasticity and epigenetics invite […]

Francesco Vitale (bio)University of Salerno Abstract In the unpublished seminar La vie la mort (Life-Death) (1975-76), Derrida reads The Logic of Life by the biologist François Jacob. The seminar is oriented to answer a question already advanced in Of Grammatology: what are the deconstructive effects—if any—provoked by grafting the theory of information onto biological research, […]

Vicki Kirby (bio)Astrid Schrader (bio) Eszter Timár (bio) Abstract The word biodeconstruction asks us to consider what is appropriate to deconstruction as a practice and to reflect on the relationship between the discourse of biology and that practice. Within literary, philosophical, and cultural debate, deconstruction appears as a recognisable mode or style of analysis. However, […]