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Queer Aesthetics will be a new section for GLQ, and this essay explains its focus and rationale as it replaces the Moving Image Review. This essay outlines the need for queer aesthetics as an analytic as it relates to changes in liberal governance and media representation, subjectless critique, and academic discourse. In addition, it outlines a genealogy of queer aesthetics and form and questions the centrality of representation as a discourse for queer theory and studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay develops a theory of Mika Rottenberg's video art by attending to both the content her work represents (neoliberalism's logic of gendered labor) and the formal characteristics by which her art affects (sensibly drawing the viewer in while resisting assimilation into conceptual critique). Rottenberg's art flirts with a logic of cognitive mapping by suggesting the structures of global production and gendered labor that characterize our neoliberal world order. Through editing and documentary-like international filming, her works suture seemingly disparate locations and activities within an international division of labor. At the same time, her art is neither didactic nor a means to gain abstract, maplike vision of the networked global production system. Rottenberg's art disorients the viewer through pleasurable, haptic, and nonsensical proximities that provide a felt sense of enmeshment within the viewing experience. Rottenberg's art recasts what we might understand not only as the political affectiveness of contemporary art but also the role of aesthetics within feminist practice and critique. This theory of political aesthetics privileges the value of sensible revitalization found in the encounter with art, while departing from established (left) expectations that art's most pressing political relevance is in its ability to raise consciousness or perform critique. This article builds this argument by moving in detail through three of Rottenberg's recent videos: NoNoseKnows (2015), Cosmic Generator (2017), and Spaghetti Blockchain (2019–24). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines a theory of aromantic and asexual film aesthetics exemplified in a reading of the surrogacy comedy Together Together (dir. Nikole Beckwith, US, 2021). Contextualizing this analysis within the long genre history of the romantic comedy, the article argues that this film constitutes a challenge to the presiding atmosphere of compulsory sexuality in contemporary culture by focalizing a platonic intergenerational friendship, highlighting the quotidian charms and pleasures of that nonsexual and nonromantic relationship, and portraying it as both nurturing and finite. As the article shows, the emerging field of asexuality studies offers a rich ground for intersectional feminist film studies and ongoing scholarship on the romantic comedy genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the journal "Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum" and its principles of aesthetics and anthropology the laws of comparative literary research. Topics discussed include questions about the evaluation of the journal in terms of its authorship and scholarly orientation, the challenge between translation and polyglotism, and the principle of decaglotism and the problem of Babelism.

This article argues that the archipelagic serves as a potent cultural geographic figure challenging resurgent nationalisms in two specific ways. First, it enables us to explore a simultaneous proximity and distance in cultural politics; second, it leads us astray from the conceptual binary that would insist that it is simply other to the nation. In doing so, it arrives at a universalism that is fundamentally differentiated. The essay pursues this framework through an analysis of Miko Revereza's recent documentary film, No Data Plan (2019), which explores Revereza's undocumented status in the United States, and its repertoire of aesthetic techniques, including its erratic and partial framing of his train journey across the country as well as its disjointed soundtrack. Above all, the essay draws attention to the film's use of captions, through which Revereza's mother's story is narrated, and which cannot be reconciled with the rest of the film. Her captions hover in proximity to the filmic diegesis without seeking presence, rejecting a dialectical engagement with a presence in the film that stands in for a documented presence in the nation. By choosing instead to "speak nearby," she disturbs conventional cultural political logics and dwells within an archipelagic relation to the film, her son, and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the aesthetic and economic forms of judgment that guided the Japanese literature translation program at the American publisher Alfred A. Knopf Inc. in the 1950s—1970s. During these years, the editor Harold Strauss coordinated Knopf's ambitious translation program that made dozens of recently written Japanese novels available in English to an American audience. This article provides a fresh perspective on Knopf's well-known Japanese literature translation program by understanding it to be an illuminating case study that reveals how the practical business of cultural commerce mixes aesthetic and economic modes of valuation, producing provocative connections that link what might otherwise seem to be the antagonistic realms of art and the market. Guided by documents held in the Knopf corporate archive, the article shows how the aesthetics of modern Japanese literature and the economics of publishing each encountered the other in the transactional territory of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kenyan-born, US-based artist Wangechi Mutu is fascinated by the human body and its nonhuman possibilities. In Mutu's collaged works, human forms are repeatedly ripped apart and reassembled within fantasy landscapes that speak of decomposition and regrowth. This article analyzes the significance of trees to Mutu's project of dismantling the human. Drawing from critical plant studies, forest ecology, cultural anthropology, and the mycological turn, it argues that Mutu's artworks forcefully reclaim the nonhuman as a site of Black expressive culture. These artworks blur ontological distinctions between the human and the arboreal through xyloid sexuality, a weirding of human eroticism and reproduction that pushes desire, procreation, and sexual fulfillment beyond species boundaries. Mutu's use of xyloid sexuality can be understood as a radical utopian gesture to supplant the violence of the colonial gaze with a powerfully more-than-human Black gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, by looking to the generalization of a certain kind of artistic or creative character in paradigms of work, there is a view onto a different kind of relationship between culture and militant action and fugitivity. Here, the term destituent art is proposed to sketch out a form of cultural production that does or might lay waste not only to institutional targets of critique but also to the structurally immanent belief in institutional reform that underlies the aesthetics of that critique. It is an invitation to reconsider some key myths that structure art discourse (even if they appear as objects of critique) and an appeal to read that discursivity as not just productive but potentially destituent. To do so, the author reads operaismo's rereading of Marx against Marxism alongside theorizations of destituent insurrection through the subject of the artist. Some recent social movements in New York City targeting art institutions are analyzed to consider this connection. Like Colectivo Situaciones' discussion of destituent insurrection as a grammar that unifies surplus populations through their expressions of refusal (the riot, the strike, the commune) that are simultaneously modes of reorganizing forms of life, a destituent art would not signal a turn to a productive pessimism—that all creative work is already subsumed—but that the cultivation of destituent power actualizes and is actualized by the aesthetic production of places of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the discourse of abstraction among Beijing intellectuals in response to the artist Wu Guanzhong's 吴冠中 (1919–2010) published essays on formal and abstract beauty from 1979 and 1980. By introducing Wu through a new critical lens that emphasizes his writings and institutional critique, the author addresses how abstraction was repurposed for early post‐Mao China. Where institutional elites in Beijing regarded painterly abstraction with unease, owing to its continued associations with the bourgeois‐capitalist art worlds of Paris and New York, this article shows how Wu performed an aesthetic intervention through writing, utilizing scientism and Maoist logic to filter abstraction through the still‐hegemonic language of radical materialism, which allowed abstraction to take hold as a renewed term of engagement in the early post‐Mao art world by 1983. This article is a shortened version of a chapter in the author's recently published book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we see beyond colonialism? And how might we be able to apprehend the work of those who saw themselves as living and creating the strictures of imperial control? This article argues for an uncolonial approach to knowledge creation, rejecting imperial history's endless desire to uncover new bodies of evidence, which largely replicate our existing understanding of the ways in which Europeans subjugated Others. Instead, it argues for the ethical imperative of locating lost, forgotten, or erased scripts of Indigenous being and agency that lie largely unexcavated in our archives of the imperial moment. Using a case study of so-called "Bāb Art" from 1920s CE Algeria, the essay explores the manner in which unloved, rough, and ephemeral modes of art possess the potential to serve as touchstones through which we might see unconquered forms of thinking, imagination, and belief that presently lie outside the bounds of our human story. In considering the spiritual and aesthetic significance of these works, it is argued that we are able to open up new vistas, which allow for glimpses of futures that begin again from threads long thought lost to the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the influence of defeat on Arabic poetic form, particularly Mahmud Darwish's turn to free verse after 1948. Topics include the challenge of expressing defeat through existing aesthetic forms, the reinvention of form in writing, and the urgent but late question of what it means to be human.

The article focuses on the gap in philosophical discourse, noting the lack of influential theories on aesthetic value compared to other areas like morality or justice. It points out the dominance of "aesthetic hedonism," which equates aesthetic value to the pleasure derived from experiences. It proposes an alternative, arguing that aesthetic value is communal rather than individualistic.

Featuring a conversation with the artist, this essay offers a reading of Amina Ross's aesthetic practice across a selection of their work. Alongside Fred Moten's own critique of the overrepresentation of blackness as death-driven, it highlights their ongoing contributions to what they refer to as "black work," or aesthetic experimentations in making multiple forms of blackness appear and emerge in the present moment. For Ross, the present is not merely a death-driven end but, at once, a rigid structure and a "space of unlimited potential" wherein blackness and black life may be experienced in their multiplicity. Placing objects in unexpected positions and built structures, Ross seeks to widen spectators' sense of their own present and immediate environment. As such, the present is, for them, a space to be, not escaped from, but worked on and reenvisioned in an effort to make a black present possible, livable, and replenishable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that opium's pivotal role in nineteenth-century political economy and aesthetics constructed addiction as a relationship between labor and capital that has persisted throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discourses on opium addiction frame it as a crisis of sovereignty for individuals and masses in ways that veil its relationships to labor, collectivity, and community. Yet addiction arises within broad systems as much as it does within individuals: in this exemplary case, of labor, empire, opium, and logistics. This essay rereads nineteenth-century discourses of opium addiction through "the logistical sublime," in which all manufacturing and distribution processes go smoothly, and "the logistical nightmare," in which they descend into chaos. It reframes opium addiction as a logistical technique that secured and maintained the preeminence of British, and later, Chinese and US imperial capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asia is everywhere. Asia feels ubiquitous, from soft to hard power; from high to low culture; and from the Americas to Africa. In the American cycle of capital accumulation, under Giovanni Arrighi's schema, the overrepresentation of the United States was marked through representation‐based and symbolic notions like Disneyfication (Jean Baudrillard) and "the ascendancy of whiteness" (Rey Chow). Under our contemporary Asian cycle of capital accumulation, this geographic area's affective ubiquity appears much like that of the US by saturating global public sentiment. However, considering that Asia's ubiquity emerges across sites like China, South Korea, India, and Japan, among others, what might we use to capture this sense of affective intensity and spread beyond representation‐based frames? More specifically, how do we contend with geographic space within racial capital today, and how might we update our models for understanding race and capital so as to fully grapple with this transitional moment from American empire to Global Asia? Under the American cycle, representational frames like Orientalism and white supremacy emerged to understand Asian racialization. Can these frames still help explain the ubiquity of Asia today? This essay explores how we might discuss the subject beyond representation and in light of the ubiquity of Asia and what methods we deploy for Marxist analysis. This essay focuses less on Asian bodies and Asian spaces and turns toward aesthetic objects and practices that engage the affective sublime. More specifically, it examines the aesthetics of fireworks for what they might offer as a lexicon to contend with the transition in cycles of capital accumulation and changes in our ideas of space and race. The article thus turns to the artist Cai Guo‐Qiang for insight on the subject amid contemporary racial capital and the methods available for critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay approaches the problem of the act from the perspective of psychoanalysis, which teaches us that the fear of the act as catastrophic—and especially as a mortal threat to the social bond—is often synonymous with the repudiation of the unconscious itself, whether by the individual subject or by the collective. To understand how an act of the unconscious can be received as catastrophic, whether by the actor or by others, we first have to consider both the resistance to the act at the level of the ego and its censorship by culture and civilization. For this we need to be more explicit about the nature of the act with which psychoanalysis is concerned, which is very different from other kinds of acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are presented with mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids' components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category. Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality. Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context. Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception's relation to language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically compares two recent approaches to the problem of aesthetic autonomy: Dave Beech's Art and Value and Nicholas Brown's Autonomy. By recentering the differences between these critics' works around Marx's categories of subsumption, it evaluates the fraught relationship between labor and aesthetics, economy and form, art and the market. Although Beech provides a persuasive account of art's "economic exceptionalism," his focus on the qualitative irreducibility of artistic labor risks losing sight of what is socially unique about aesthetic production. Likewise, and inversely, while Brown's original account of art's internal overcoming of the commodity-form provides a generative way to rethink aesthetics in modernism's wake, it rests on a periodizing claim for the total domination of the capitalist market that equivocates on whether artistic labor can truly be "really subsumed" under capital. The article concludes by pondering the political dimension to these theories of autonomy, which mirror in important ways debates within communization circles over subsumption, programmatism, and the aesthetics of revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay calls for a theoretical discussion of the aesthetics and politics of comparison in contemporary German Jewish literature and beyond. It describes the tendency of recent German Jewish writers and thinkers to compare and connect the experiences of Jews to those of other minoritized groups. The essay briefly discusses several theoretical paradigms that spell out the political stakes of such comparisons, including touching tales (Leslie Adelson) and multidirectional memory (Michael Rothberg). It then draws attention to another modality of comparison that is particularly promising because of its purposive abstractness and its relevance for literary texts: similarity. Finally, the essay offers two examples of the productive use of similarity in recent German Jewish literature: Katja Petrowskaja's Vielleicht Esther (which connects different instances of historical trauma) and Sasha Marianna Salzmann's Außer sich (which weaves the experience of a Syrian refugee in Istanbul into a web of similar migratory movements). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes an ethics for critical philosophies attuned to global white supremacy and its effects of violence, erasure, and precarity. The essay examines Arthur Schopenhauer as a potential forefigure for critical practices that aim to attend to the precarious survival of the global majority engulfed by white supremacy and racial capitalism. Through Denise Ferreira da Silva's and Sara Ahmed's philosophies of race, the essay carries out an autotheoretical dissection—tracing Ruffin's own myopic relation to the white supremacist moralities that continue to thrive in critical interdisciplinary German studies. As a way out of the aporia that white supremacy enacts, the essay proposes an orientation away from what is thought to be life and toward a critical aesthetics that attends to the unsurviving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews a series of photographs by South African photographer Omar Badsha exhibited as part of Sharjah Biennial 15 (SB15). Collectively entitled Once We Were Warriors: Women and Resistance in the South African Liberation Struggle (1981–1999), the thirty-one images selected for SB15 highlight the role of women as political activists during the 1980s and 1990s across South Africa. The essay discusses Badsha's biography and approach to photography, in addition to appraising the images themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2015, Cheikh Ndiaye has been painting the most famous theaters between Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and Dakar, Senegal, including their emblematic names: the Mansour, Liberté, VOG, Vox, ABC, Rio, the Medina, and Le Paris, et cetera. The artist's obsessive paintings are without decorative or exotic intention. All of these movie houses stand, as if they were clichés of one another, as "realistic" representations of the chaos left behind by a foreclosed socialist utopia or a neo-liberal trash dump site; they interpellate the viewer/spectator. Cheikh Ndiaye's paintings of old movie theaters are intriguing for more than one reason. They are as fascinating for the visual information they reveal as they are for what each painting seems to be hiding, or for the opacity it claims for itself. This essay provides a Glissantian reading of Ndiaye's movie-theater paintings, not as transparent and nostalgic representations of iconic film houses, but as refigurations of landscape paintings. As Glissant puts it, landscape (le paysage) is not only a character on equal footing with the human and nonhuman species that occupy it in literature, paintings, and film; it has also become clear, for environmental and cultural reasons, that ignoring it risks undermining these art forms. Like Glissant, Ndiaye is revisiting the landscapes of closed movie-theaters for the purpose of reinvesting them with a new aesthetics, and a new way of visualizing the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thinking along Ariel Brown's 2021 video history | alchemy | evolution, this introduction approaches "suspension" as a concept, hermeneutic, aesthetic practice, and ethics of intellectual praxis by focusing on the way it dovetails with the radical work the prefix ana‐ performs in Black studies and the way black aesthetic practices often hinge on anaoriginarity and anachronism as they seek to effect anarchitectural interventions in the languages and institution of artmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sampada Aranke and Ayanah Moor dialogue on the myriad ways Moor intervenes upon art histories of abstraction in her studio practice. This conversation leads to threads and themes in her practice that open up avenues for rethinking liminality, suspension, and ongoingness that are central to this issue of liquid blackness. Moor calls her method "social abstraction," by reconsidering how abstraction, a practice mis‐categorized as one that transcends identity, might be precisely the form for centering black subjectivity. Moor is invested in the racial and gendered aspects that might be latent in abstract practices; where, for example, collage does and does not serve as an operation for encountering black interior or romantic space. Throughout her work, there is a careful attention to restraint as a method of protection, precision, and engagement. Moor's enactment of the processual and suspended logics of form as an aesthetic and social process resonate in the worlds of her paintings as they also leap beyond the panel itself. It's almost as if Moor is allowing her viewer to relish in and embrace the unfixity of a shape, the emergence of a figure, the suspension of a line, as a way to embrace the ongoingness of their own becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the abstract aesthetics of J. M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy—The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus—as emphasizing the pertinence of the religious in terms of a rupturing of an ontotheological vision of the world. It analyzes Coetzee's employment of religious allegory in the trilogy as a commentary on the birth of religious consciousness that finds its ultimate meaning in an opening out of hermetic experience toward social community and unthematizable singularity. Using Jean-Luc Nancy's ideas of Christianity as a deconstructive event and the ecstatic sense of the world, this essay traces the thematic cohesion of the trilogy in terms of an understanding of divinity that provides an atheological grounding of phenomenological sense. This reading not only emphasizes Coetzee's turn toward a "leaner" style in his late writing as the mark of a unique novelistic outlook toward the pertinence of transcendence in a postsecular world, but also engages with previous readings of allegory in Coetzee's work to posit a different understanding of allegory to be a conscious textual choice that both separates and ties together "fallen" temporality and the redemptive potentialities of literature, resulting in a sense of reality that stubbornly leads outside of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water has held a privileged place in theorizations of Vietnamese refugee being. Drawing from Ocean Vuong's chapbook Burnings (2010) and novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019) along with Tuan Andrew Nguyen's film The Boat People (2020), this article traces an alternative genealogy of Vietnamese diasporic aesthetics based on the element of fire. Theorizing fire as another critical site of refugee passages, these works evince a pyric refugee onto-epistemology, one that conceives of fire and ash as explicit matter-metaphors of living and beauty that refuse the sensory diminution of racialized subjects as a result of US imperial and militaristic violence. Fire carries with it a destructive valence, and ash is taken as evidence of ruin and disaster. However, the explorations of fire and ash in both artists' work not only attest to the various onto-epistemological unravelings signified by fire and ash but also conceive of the possibilities and openings for a refugee poiesis that emerges in the aftermath of destruction. Both Vuong and Nguyen stage haptic encounters with ash that wrestle with questions of sensation and subjectivity in the narration of personal and collective trauma. Paradoxically, these texts espouse the notion that any possibility of refugee futurity happens through contact with the subjunctive power of that which is insensible, ash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various topics within the issue, including sensory aesthetics, Puritan exceptionalism, and sensation.

This article considers the cinematic works of the contemporary American artist Sharon Lockhart in the context of what it identifies as philosophies and practices of "the casual," from the impact of Emersonian aesthetics on post – World War II American avant‐garde cinema to Lockhart's unique version of "hanging out," which resonates considerably with how Leo Bersani defines sociability. Viewing Lockhart's aesthetic signatures (her use of extreme long takes, static long shots, the natural settings of the majority of her films, and the anonymous identity and relations of her subjects, many of whom are children) first as manifestations of Emerson's and Heidegger's efforts to avoid the violence of Western thinking that they call "clutching" and "grasping" at the world, and then as instantiations of Bersani's notion of sociability as "a form of relationality uncontaminated by desire," the article argues that her films manifest an eco‐cinema that proposes living less invasively in the world. It goes on to show that, for Lockhart, this environmental ethos emerges from her use of the casual to delicately craft a cinema of social care that allows its subjects the freedom of not having their relations or identities defined by or within the cinematic frame. Lockhart's cinema is thus unique for deploying an aesthetics that can be described as casual, oblique, and nonchalant, toward ethical ends that have both sociological and environmental implications, what Bersani terms "queer ecology." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document provides brief biographical information about various contributors to the journal "Poetics Today." Larry Abramson is an artist and former professor, known for his extensive exhibitions and teaching career in Israel. Petra Aczél is a professor of communication and rhetoric in Budapest, with research interests in rhetorical theory and future skills. Michalle Gal is a philosophy professor specializing in aesthetics and visual ontology. David Gil is a linguistics researcher with a focus on Indonesian and West Papuan languages. David Gorman is an associate professor of English, and Garry Hagberg is a philosophy and aesthetics professor. Michèle Bokobza Kahan is a professor of French culture and literature, and Olivier Morin is a researcher in cognitive anthropology. Yeshayahu Shen is a researcher in cognitive studies and literature. Oleg Sobchuk studies the historical dynamics of literature and arts, and Guy Tal is a lecturer in art and design history, focusing on witchcraft and gender in early modern Italian and Spanish art. [Extracted from the article]

The article explores the motif of eye-gouging as a gruesome element of the uncanny, spanning genres like horror, literature, and psychoanalysis. It delves into its significance in relation to Freudian psychoanalysis, cultural symbolism, and its resonance with contemporary events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It further examines how the uncanny returns in times of crisis, impacting perceptions, trust, and control.

Georg Lukács's argument of form and formation is traced from The Theory of the Novel to History and Class Consciousness, especially "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat." The concept of form in The Theory of the Novel is compared to the contemporary philosophy of science by Émile Boutroux's and Georg Simmel's lectures on Kant and, in particular, Kantian aesthetics. Form and formation are in the scientific and in the aesthetic context developed against the backdrop of the deficit or even lack of formal organization and, consequently, as a necessary yet contingent intervention. This understanding of form characterizes, for Lukács, the modern novel as well as the capitalist economic and social system. Against Hegel's teleology of the spirit but consistent with Marx, the modernity of the novel and of capitalism, respectively, appears in Lukács thus as structurally defining in and of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the resurgence of interest in Georg Lukács, a Hungarian philosopher and literary theorist, following his marginalization during the postmodernism era. It discusses Lukács's various transformations and reinventions throughout his lifetime and reflects on his legacy in academia and public discourse, particularly celebrating the centennial of his influential work "History and Class Consciousness" (1923).

This essay reads Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's controversial novel Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961) for its contribution to discourses about aging masculinity and male sexuality in later life. The Diary meditates on the mental and physical vicissitudes of aging masculinity, arousal, control, and impotence, focused through the fictional diarist Utsugi's physical ailments and expression of libidinal intensities. The article argues for Tanizaki's depiction of male aging as an exercise in both disenfranchisement and agentive potential. First, it reads the aging process through aesthetic and visual strategies, which magnify the protagonist's cultivation of masochistic pleasure as a specific correlative of aging. The article demonstrates that the narrative uses the rhetoric of cinema and photography—central terms of reference in Tanizaki's work—to frame Utsugi's experiences of old age, and inform his erotic fantasies as stylized, staged performances. In conjunction with these visual modes, the novel draws on traditional Japanese aesthetics to conceptualize the potential affect and perverse empowerment of the aging experience. Second, it addresses the implications of narrative form, as the self-reflexive, first-person diary prioritizes the subjectivity of Utsugi's male old age, while the novel's final pages interrupt and thus alter the diary's significance as a private account of self-expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89) is best known for his utopian realist novel What Is to Be Done? (1863). However, he was perhaps most celebrated as a literary thinker in China as a result of the Soviet canonization of the nineteenth-century "democratic critics." This essay discusses two Chinese critics' engagement with Chernyshevsky's treatise The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality (1853). Here Chernyshevsky advanced the proposition "Beauty is life." In the 1930s and 1940s the literary theorist Zhou Yang read Chernyshevsky and produced a Chinese translation in 1942. In 1963 the philosopher Zhu Guangqian published the History of Western Aesthetics, in which he devoted a chapter to Chernyshevsky. This article explores how both Zhou and Zhu responded to Chernyshevsky's proposition on beauty and life, with particular attention to all three thinkers' engagement with Ludwig Feuerbach's "transformative method" in his critique of Christianity, which sought to invert the relation between subject and predicate. Both Zhou and Zhu alighted on how Chernyshevsky's reliance on Feuerbach led to a one-sided interpretation that needed further articulation; they marshaled the insights of Marx and Hegel to reinterpret Chernyshevsky. Finally, the essay considers the issue of transnational Bildung between Russia and China and the teacher-student relation as expressions of totality along the lines of both Feuerbachian transformative critique and Hegelian speculative retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leo Bersani's writings on aesthetics, often coauthored with Ulysse Dutoit, repeatedly deploy the trope of withdrawal, finding in the aesthetic works they discuss, such as Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt, a paradoxical double movement of bringing into view while projecting the erasure of form and distinction. In their reading of Contempt, Bersani and Dutoit adumbrate a uniformity that would depend on the elimination of measurement, reference, and subject-object relations. In doing so, they transfigure the idea of antirelationality often attributed to Bersani, associating the death it surely names with the illumination of Being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers Leo Bersani's concept of "incongruity" as a key term in his thinking of ethical relation and, specifically, as a description of the desynchronized movement and impersonal configuration of bodies, psyches, thoughts, and things, in which the formal mobilization of aesthetic perceptions of sameness replaces the immobilizing forces of desirous knowing and difference. Highlighted is the way in which sameness is not based on a single predicate of commonality, but instead obtains in similar forms of movement that inaugurate correspondences with others and the world. This sheds light on Bersani's familiar notions of inaccurate replication and homo-narcissism within his broader exploration of potential intimacies pleasurably discovered via a sense of universal sameness as opposed to the often murderous fixation on identity and difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay treats the concept of coercion in Leo Bersani's writings as a matter connected to questions of aesthetic form, mobility, and immobility. It reads passages from his work on Derek Jarman's film Caravaggio, among others, to argue for noncoercive modes of attention and relationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay studies figures of arrest and mobility, imprisonment and release, and "rigor and extravagance" in Leo Bersani's writings. Focusing on The Forms of Violence, a study of late Assyrian sculpture coauthored with Ulysse Dutoit and first published in 1985, the essay at once follows and moves away from the book's analysis of "a cage which imprisons nothing." Asking what this analysis discloses and what it occludes, the essay turns briefly to the vast expansion of California's carceral state that forms a historical backdrop for the book's composition. The author reads The Forms of Violence as unseeing this expansion as well as the history of the institution that sustains Bersani and Dutoit's reflections: the museum. Written as a tribute to Bersani, the essay attends to both his style and the movements of his thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editors' introduction to this special issue of differences titled Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani describes the issue's focus on the speculative importance of aesthetics in Leo Bersani's scholarship, especially his attention to a "syntax of thought," or the structural innovations of thinking, reading, and perception explored throughout his critical writings. The introduction also emphasizes Bersani's ongoing attention to relationality through the aesthetic and how it contributed to his decades-long rethinking of sexuality, sociality, politics, and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers Bersani and Dutoit's alignment of passivity and the aesthetic in "Merde Alors," their essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Salò. Passivity is a key strategy for the production of works of art and is key to understanding the mode of the aesthetic itself. The question of passivity appears elsewhere in Bersani's work, and "Merde Alors"—in whole or in part—was republished at key moments in Bersani's career. This essay gestures toward why "Merde Alors" has had such an interesting and prolific afterlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the status of John Guillory's Cultural Capital thirty years after its publication. Responding to an ongoing crisis in the humanities (which seems never to have passed) and to the "canon wars" of literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s, Cultural Capital refocused the debate about literary canons and aesthetic value away from contests of judgment in order to describe the social and institutional contexts of canon formation. What emerges from Guillory's Bourdieusian framework is a brilliant account not only of the process of canon formation but also of the professional anxieties that attend arguments about canonicity and representation. The essay explores the structure of Guillory's argument and considers why this work has been largely absent in recent debates about the state of the profession and the discipline of literary studies. The essay then introduces each contribution to this special issue, which seeks to bring Guillory's theory of canon formation back into contemporary debates about the future of literary studies, the politics of cultural representation, and the state of the humanities in crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through this generic recategorization, she argues that Griggs critiques the idea of the social survey's observer in a way that Du Bois, author of the more traditional social survey I The Philadelphia Negro i , could not quite manage. Womack insists that "this is not expressly a book about Du Bois, but he haunts every chapter" (29). Womack calls his remarkable 1899 I Imperium in Imperio i "liberation sociology" and "more of a social survey than a novel" (72). [Extracted from the article]

Black transness has been marked and made broken by necropolitical systems of power. Theories and politics of and for black trans women have often prioritized a rejection of or confrontation with this "state of brokenness," as poet Nat Raha terms it. Visual artist Tourmaline offers a different relationship with brokenness in her call to "come undone," whereby those who are "broken" can gather their broken pieces together not to heal but to give and share one's pieces with another. This essay engages Tourmaline's Salacia (2019), a film about the life of Mary Jones, a black trans sex worker who became infamous in 1836 following her arrest in New York City, as producing a black trans aesthetic of brokenness. Using a collage style of placing distinct frames upon frames, Tourmaline mixes speculative retellings of Jones's life alongside archival footage of Latina trans activist Sylvia Rivera to create an image built from the pieces and fragments of the trans archive. This aesthetic of brokenness offers an aestheticization of Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation" that holds and cares for black transness, a practice of gathering and being‐with and being‐for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Benjamin's ambivalent engagement with anarchist thought extends beyond well-known works from the early 1920s such as "Critique of Violence" (1921). Contemporary anarchist thinkers, including Gustav Landauer and Georges Sorel, influenced Benjamin and many of his associates, including Ernst Bloch, Erich Unger, Hugo Ball, and Gershom Scholem. This article describes the place of anarchism in Benjamin's work, particularly in the fragment "World and Time" (1919) and in the essay on surrealism (1929), as a rhetorical double inversion, in which two reversals reconceptualize anarchist thought to yield original insights on questions of political agency, aesthetics, and tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the problematic presence of the inanimate in elegiac form. Focusing on Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) as translator/elegist of Paul Celan (1920–1970), this essay argues that Hill's poetry responds to the challenge of addressing the nonliving by way of Celan's own poetics of the inanimate. This doubled incorporation of the inanimate puts under pressure concepts of poetic form and of reading that are structured by organic animation. Hill's poems emerge as structured by a principle of inorganic production that finds its aesthetic paradigm in Kant's concept of "crystallization." Reading the emergence of nonorganic processes from organic spaces in Hill's work, the reemergence of a postindustrial pastoral in elegiac form, and the translation of the crystal-image of ice from Celan's poetry into Hill's own, this essay addresses the possibility of thinking form as a nonorganic process in elegy, and of thinking an elegiac poetics of form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is against this larger background, in which decadence's scientific inflections are clearest, that Freedman's emphasis on the specifically Jewish decadence yields the most insight. Jonathan Freedman, The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Barzun hated Wagner, and what he hated in Wagner was Wagner's decadence, which he understood to be consonant with the composer's anti-Semitism. [Extracted from the article]

This essay reads Jacques Lacan's 1967 "Proposition on the Analyst of the School" from the perspectives of the metapsychology that upholds the Pass at the École freudienne du Québec and of aesthetic acts in Andy Goldsworthy's ephemeral works. Specifically, it examines the aesthetic act as a possible path for the unbound drive upon traversing castration. It argues that the Pass is, specifically, a transindividual act of solidarity with desire that extends its ethics and efficacy beyond both the institutional frameworks of psychoanalysis and the control of cultures and civilizations. The essay relates Freud's thoughts on transience and beauty to the end of analysis and concludes with a reading of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's "Les Roses de Saadi" to contend that the transmission of the Pass occurs on the level of sensation to attain, beyond cultural particularities, desire as the common cause of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out to explore the playful poetics of recent indie games in terms of what could be described as metareferential interfaces. Drawing on a range of theories from literary studies, media studies, and game studies, we propose to conceptualize metareferential interfaces as interfaces that foreground and draw attention to their own mediality. They thus allow for videogame-specific forms of metareference and metalepsis to be employed as part of often quite experimental and aesthetically ambitious approaches to videogame design. Using the recent indie games Pony Island (2016) and OneShot (2016) as our core case studies, we offer an in-depth analysis of this metaization of videogames' playful poetics, focusing primarily on three salient aspects: First, the multiplication of interfaces can lead to mise-en-abyme-like structures that highlight and reflect on the mediality of videogames while also establishing ontological boundaries between different levels of videogame storyworlds. Second, the disruption of interface functionality is a metareferential strategy that can be used to establish specific gameplay challenges and reflect on the design conventions of videogame interfaces. Third, the transgression of ontological boundaries affects not only the borders between subworlds within a videogame's storyworld but also the more fundamental distinction between what is "in the game" and what is "outside it." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholarship on Suzanne Césaire has illuminated the critical role of ecopoetics in her writing, the strong psychoanalytic resonances that underpin her theory of Caribbean aesthetics and identity remain underexplored. This essay suggests that these resonances must be read alongside her reflections on aesthetics—specifically, the relationship between art and nature—in order to elucidate a fuller picture of Césaire's ecopoetic theory of Caribbean subject formation. The author examines Césaire's writing on art and civilization within the context of her explicit engagement with surrealism and her more camouflaged engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis. Taken together, these threads reveal Césaire's vision of Caribbean art as a collaborative rather than conquest-oriented relation between the self and the environment. The essay ultimately argues that Césaire's investigations of aesthetics, visuality, and psychoanalysis led her to an ecologically grounded theory of Caribbean subject formation articulated through her vision of a totalité-vie (life-totality) that is accessed through artistic production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]