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This book explores the imaginative identification with animals enabled by aggression and the narcissistic aversion from them manifested as destructiveness. It explores the attraction to the society of other animals that finds expression in stories about human beings who try to join them, and the affects that cluster around the possibility that the human body is susceptible in various ways to becoming animal. The book looks at two different kinds of attempt to imagine the removal of the boundary separating human beings from other animals. A discussion is presented of the correlation between articulate utterance and social complexity in Aristotle's zoological and political works, which leaves open the possibility that birds may be capable of a degree of political organization comparable to that of human beings. The book contrasts Aristotle's curiosity about the social lives of other animals with Aristophanes' Birds, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Rigadoon, in all of which isolated individuals who have fallen out of human society experience some form of fascination with the social groups of animals they discover beyond its confines.

This book examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little-known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, the author explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously “the question of the animal.”

Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory. Hegel did. To support this contention, The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel’s dialectic as theory. It begins with the untold story about Hegel, who boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits of thought to fashion his dialectic. While his contemporaries rejected premodern dialectic as outdated dogma, Hegel embraced both its emphasis on language as thought and its fascination with the categories of identity and difference, creating what we now recognize as theory as distinct from systematic philosophy. Not content merely to change philosophy, Hegel also used this dialectic to expose the persistent archaism of modern life itself, establishing a method of social analysis that has influenced everyone from Marx and the nineteenth-century Hegelians, to Nietzsche and Bakhtin, all the way to Deleuze and Jameson. By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, The Birth of Theory will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a powerful reinterpretation of Hegel’s famous master/slave dialectic, The Birth of Theory places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way. Daring to reconcile the sworn enemies of Hegelianism and Deleuzianism, this timely book revitalizes dialectics for the twenty-first century.

Bleak Liberalism advances a renewed account of liberalism, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the way liberal concepts, principles, and aspirations have informed novelistic art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain and the US. From the writings of John Stuart Mill through the debates of the cold war and beyond, liberalism is a philosophical and political project conceived in an acute awareness of the challenges and often bleak prospects confronting it. These challenges are shown to be various, encompassing a range of psychological, sociological, and economic conditions. This renewed account of liberalism forms the basis for literary analyses focused on the interplay of political themes and elements of literary form, including narrative, dialogue, character, and perspective. The study includes analyses of canonical works of high realism (Dicken’s Bleak House, Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Trollope’s The Way We Live Now), political novels (Dickens’s Hard Times, Gaskell’s North and South, Forster’s Howards End, Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey), and experimental works of modernism (Ellison’s Invisible Man, Lessing’s The Golden Notebook) that dramatize the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century in striking ways. A central role is played in this study by the liberalism of the war and cold war era, and especially the work of Lionel Trilling, given the vivid debates during this era about the role of art in the face of challenging experiences of political disenchantment and renewed aspiration. The impact of neoliberalism on theories of liberalism is also discussed.

In Robert Bresson’s cinematography the linkage of fragmented, heterogeneous images challenges our assumption that we know what things are, or the infinite ways persons, animals, and material objects can be attuned or entangled. In Bresson’s films, an aesthetic principle thus becomes an ethical instrument to carve out an ontology in which the truth of categorical fixities is menaced. The Bond of the Furthest Apart argues that Bresson’s visionary rethinkings run parallel to suppositions about individuality, ontology, and the demystification of human privilege in the philosophical fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Kafka. The bond of the book’s title refers to the counterpoint and antinomy within particular works and beneath the strains of these literary and cinematic works which are kindred in their revelation of things that lure us toward them in the absence of an orienting perspective that would make what is seen precisely recognizable.

“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric.” This book challenges Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. It considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake. The chapter juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust—Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus, and Kertész’s Fatelessness-with Kafka’s novels and Morrison’s Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, the chapter questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz—a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust—and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The book is a study of literature’s value to fathoming the unfathomable.

Do killers, artists, and terrorists need one another? This book explores the disturbing adjacency of literary creativity to violence and even political terror. The book begins by anchoring the discussions in the events of 9/11 and the scandal provoked by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's reference to the destruction of the World Trade Center as a great work of art, and they go on to show how political extremism and avant-garde artistic movements have fed upon each other for at least two centuries. The book reveals how the desire beneath many romantic literary visions is that of a terrifying awakening that would undo the West's economic and cultural order. This is also the desire, of course, of what is called terrorism. As the authority of writers and artists recedes, it is criminals and terrorists, the book suggests, who inherit this romantic, destructive tradition. Moving freely between the realms of high and popular culture, and fictional and actual criminals, the book describes a web of impulses that catches an unnerving spirit. This unorthodox approach pairs Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment with Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy, and connects the real-life Unabomber to the surrealist Joseph Cornell and to the hero of Bret Easton Ellis's bestselling novel American Psycho. The book evokes a desperate culture of art through thematic dialogues among authors and filmmakers as varied as Don DeLillo, Joseph Conrad, Francis Ford Coppola, and Jean Genet, among others.

In the late 1960s Derrida speculated that “Cultural Graphology” could be the name of a new human science, a discipline combining psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself, but he did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. This book picks up where Derrida left off. Using his early thought and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed to examine printed books in early modern England, it argues that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. It demonstrates the consequence of this thought for a new history of the book and a new theory of literature. Taking the topic of writing in the four areas that Derrida suggested might be the founding locales of cultural graphology, and putting these into conversation with early modern texts, it proposes radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut”.

The identity and role of writing have evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? This book offers a study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. Its analysis brings the work of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. The book shows how the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the mathematical making of digital media. Such intellectual convergence, it argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into the postphonetic, ideographic system of digital media, which not only altered the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes but also compelled a new understanding of human–machine interplay at the level of the unconscious.

This is a book about the neglected dialogue between several influential twentieth-century theorists of political theology and early modern texts. It focuses on Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Ernst Kantorowicz, Ernst Cassirer, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud, and their readings of Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Spinoza. The book argues that the modern critics find in the early modern period a break with an older form of political theology construed as the theological legitimation of the state, a new emphasis on a secular notion of human agency, and, most important, a new preoccupation with the ways art and fiction reoccupy the terrain of religion. In particular, the book argues that poiesis is the missing third term in both early modern and contemporary debates about politics and religion. Poiesis refers to the principle, first advocated by Hobbes and Vico, that we can only know what we make ourselves. This kind of making encompasses both the art of poetry and the secular sphere of human interaction, the human world of politics and history. Attention to poiesis reconfigures the usual terms of the debate and helps us see that the contemporary debate about political theology is a debate about what Hans Blumenberg called “the legitimacy of the modern age.” Against contemporary critics, who are asserting the “permanence of political theology,” the book proposes a critique of political theology and a defense of poetry broadly conceived.