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Pratique embarrassante du journalisme en ligne, contestable dans la forme comme dans le fond, les listicles (neologisme obtenu par la contraction des mots liste et article) sont le douloureux quotidien de l’amateur de musique du troisieme millenaire. Attrape-clics, auto-promo, raccourcis problematiques… Ils condensent a eux seuls a peu pres toutes les tares de la presse en ligne dediee a la musique. En septembre 2014, dans les pages de The Quietus, Drew Daniel, moitie du duo electronique Matmos, professeur de litterature americaine et musicophage insatiable, retournait l’exercice, l’eventrait et en extirpait toutes les humeurs, pour mieux en exposer la profonde perversion.

This chapter interweaves Jasbir Puar’s foundational work on “homonationalism” and “terrorist assemblages” with discussions about Samson Agonistes and the War on Terror. Combining this with early modernist work on effeminacy, Daniel argues that a resemblance between Samson as an emasculated male and Dagon as a monstrous hybrid or “queer assemblage” provokes Samson’s razing of the Philistine temple. In this analysis, Samson’s final act of religious violence is an act of anxious displacement. Anxiety likewise explains critics’ painstaking efforts to distance Milton from Samson’s terrorist act. From this shared logic of displacement, we can perceive Daniel’s urgent call for a queer Milton criticism attentive to the manifestations and effects of anxiety, including its transformation into terror.

This essay focuses upon a single dramatic scene in order to address a general problem: what is the relationship between theoretical abstraction and emotional display? William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton's collaborative play Timon of Athens seemingly insists upon the isometric correlation between affective service and the capacity to pay. Against this backdrop, there stands the ethical counterexample of Flavius, the “one good man” who, with tears in his eyes, remains loyal to his destitute master. Flavius’ affect prompts Timon to deploy a peculiar and symptomatic form: the logical syllogism. In what sense do Timon's syllogisms constitute a response to Flavius’ tears? In pursuit of answers to this question, this essay contextualizes the ambient tension between rhetoric and logic within early modern England, and considers the intersection of this dramatic scene with Hegel's account of the dynamic interdependence of lord and bondsman, and with Hegel's account of the relationship between logic and sexual ...

If the stoic tradition valorized self-killing as the ultimate example of the rational control of the passions, Christian thought regarded self-killing as a sin and a crime. Yet there is a third level at which medieval and early modern persons understood such actions as neither a moral quandary nor a philosophical exemplum but a medical problem for the emerging Renaissance sciences of life, vitality, and matter. What role might “affect” have in the understanding of self-killing as both an object of thought and a completed action when the explanatory force of humoral theory began to wane? This chapter examines two exemplary early modern texts that reveal the categorical problems and conceptual challenges posed by self-killing to emergent materialist accounts of the passions.

For early modern Christian subjects, Christ’s crucifixion and death fixes at the heart of things a momentary submission to decreation and destruction, replenished by the Resurrection and the promise of the Second Coming, but present all the same as a kind of absolute eclipse in ontotheology. With reference to the reworked “Nicene Creed” that closes Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter , this essay asks: what happens to political ecologies of vibrant matter when they confront the corpse of God? How might Renaissance political ecologies speak to contemporary political dynamics, and what stands to occupy the vacant place of suicide, then and now, within this communal nexus? This essay pursues answers to these questions by placing an early modern text on suicide, John Donne’s Biathanatos , into conversation with a contemporary theorization of community—Roberto Esposito’s Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community . Donne’s scandalous, even blasphemous, presentation of Christ as a “self-killer” in Biathanatos raises the possibility that Christian community is founded in the shadow of an originary yet occulted moment of self-destructive will, at once inferred yet unrepresentable. The socially binding consequences of this sacrificial dynamic are further explored in relation to contemporary politics, with reference to the focalizing effect of the suicide of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation catalyzed the “Arab Spring” of widespread popular revolt.

This essay reads Antonio's mysterious sadness psychoanalytically but bypasses overfamiliar, and potentially reductive, translations of early modern melancholy into Freudian melancholia. Instead, Antonio's sacrificial longing to enter into the contract with Shylock and surrender the pound of flesh on behalf of Bassanio is read as a form of masochistic fantasy (via Deleuze, Silverman, Krafft-Ebbing, and Torok). The structure of subjection and desire at work within Antonio's melancholy and his masochism bears a wider family resemblance to the buried contradictions that drive the turning worlds of Venice and Belmont. The extraction of the pound of flesh is not Antonio's masochistic fantasy alone, but the political and ethical fantasy of subjection at the heart of the playtext that surrounds him. Articulating fault lines between Christian and Jew, master and bondsman, Venice and Belmont, letter and spirit, Antonio's simultaneously melancholic and masochistic cry—"Let me have judgment, and the Jew his will"—breaks open the economic and political conflicts at the core of The Merchant of Venice .

QUEER THEORY'S ANTI-ANTI RELATIONAL TURN Drew Daniel Jose Esteban Munozs new book fights for the future of a field— queer theory—arguably defined by the differences between two works from its recent past: Mu noz's own Disidentif cations: Queers of Color and the Performance of Pol itics (1999) and Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004).' Insofar as Cruising Utopia marries an argument of crankily counterintuitive original ity to whipsmart readings of both familiar and underground queer artworks, it more than succeeds in living up to the high standard set by his previous book. Just as Dis identifications broke with then-pre vailing critical orthodoxies of gay affirmation and belonging in its evocation of the anti-identitarian

Lingering controversy about anti-Semitism has kept The Merchant of Venice off the screen. Michael Radford's 2004 film adaptation creates a critique of anti-Semitic violence revealingly at odds with the play's comic form. This review considers the challenge Shakespeare's art poses to the ethical imperatives of contemporary filmmaking.

Early modern studies has recently witnessed a striking resurgence of interest in Lucretius as a crucial figure for the dissemination of Epicurean atomism into the cultural bloodstream. Alison Brown, Catherine Wilson, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Greenblatt, and Gerard Passannante have all contributed distinctive book-length studies that track this process and theorize Lucretian after effects, echoes and resonances in the theology, history, painting, and poetry of the period.2 If there was ever a candidate for a “return of theory within early modernity,” then the return of the theory of atoms and void from medieval desuetude into the shocked, tantalized awareness of a particularly crucial galaxy of early modern readers from Machiavelli to Montaigne to Spenser offers a case in point of the uncannily necromantic return of dead ideas to virulent, conta- gious new life.