Letter from the Editor

Nietzsche's concept of "transvaluation" models a critical practice that is historically rooted, theoretically inventive, and aimed at effecting radical transformations in language, discourse, and practices of everyday life. Applying pressure to received notions of common sense—naturalized and habituated modes of thinking, sensing, and perceiving the world—transvaluation seeks to animate uncommon sense, uncommon senses. While the essays in this double volume issue of Discourse resist easy impositions of thematic unity, and only a few of the authors cite Nietzsche by name, each piece evokes a distinct critical sensibility attuned to uncommon, transvaluative critique.

The articles in the present issue represent rigorous and adventurous scholarship on representation and culture from a diverse set of geographical, historical, textual, and intellectual contexts. The essays traverse England and Japan, Hong Kong and Korea, Patagonia and Italy, considering encounters between peripheries and centers, lost and found, and past and future; they examine the aesthetics and politics of the avant-garde and the culture industries, presenting analyses of special effects, magic, time travel, complexity, traffic, and spectatorship from new and original perspectives. They interrogate the theoretical and philosophical stakes of such figures as Butler, Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger, Piper, and Sōseki from a diverse set of methodologies and approaches including postcolonial studies, queer theory, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. They examine the ethics of spectrality, embodiment, desire, interpretation, performance, and undertake fundamental questions concerning the concepts of "culture" and "life" itself.

The coming year promises to be particularly active for the journal. We are genuinely enthusiastic about the current roster of themed and general issues slated for publication, the present double issue included. They represent, in our opinion, the best qualities of Discourse's ongoing commitment to providing a vibrant forum for uncommon critical theory and cultural studies. Once again, we thank our readers for their interest and continued support.