Krister Paul Friday, “A Generation of Men Without History”: Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom

○ Abstract: This article uses a reading of Chuck Palahiuk’s novel, Fight Club, as an opportunity to construct a Lacanian framework for understanding historical self-consciousness. I argue that Fight Club’s historical imagination dramatizes the way the impossibility of defining the postmodern “present” is conflated with the interminability of identifying with one’s symptom, revealing how both are governed by the same tautological performativity. Fight Club’s narrator couches his wounded masculinity in conspicuously historical terms, seeking recognition from the Other qua History as a means of interpellating an identity for both period and self. I argue that this dynamic, a dynamic of historical interpellation, is one way texts “think historically,” to borrow Jameson’s phrase, in postmodernity. In other words, maybe texts do not reflect or reveal their time so much as they assert—performatively, imaginatively—what their time ought to be. —kpf

Julie Candler Hayes, “The Body of the Letter”: Epistolary Acts of Jean-Luc Nancy, Simon Hantaï, and Jacques Derrida

○ Abstract: Between June 1999 and April 2000, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and painter Simon Hantaï exchanged a series of letters relating to a group of artworks that Hantaï was producing to accompany the forthcoming book on Nancy by their mutual friend, Jacques Derrida ( Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy [2000]). Hantaï’s works consist of “unreadable manuscripts”: passages by Nancy and Derrida meticulously copied and recopied on stiffened crumpled batiste. Ultimately, the letters were published as La Connaissance des textes: Lecture d’un manuscrit illisible (Correspondances), including the text of the correspondence, color plates of Hantaï’s “travaux de lecture,” photographic reproductions of all the letters, and a final letter by Derrida addressed to both correspondents. This reading of the correspondence takes into account its epistolary dynamics—its logic of sending and receiving, its “message strategy”—which are analyzed in terms of a Deleuzian “desiring machine.” Other important aspects of the published correspondence include its complex negotiation of visual and discursive modes and its relationship to a set of significant pre-texts: the passages from Nancy’s Etre singulier pluriel and Derrida’s Donner le temps that Hantaï renders “unreadable” as he copies and recopies them; and, of course, Le Toucher. It is important to look at Connaissance not only as a “text,” but also as a “book”: a physical object, manifesting production constraints and editorial choices that subtly interact with the dialogue of the correspondents. This analysis is shaped by the reflections of Derrida, Nancy, and other scholars and theoreticians on the vicissitudes of “the letter” and its emblematic relation to questions of textual materiality, production, and reproduction. —jch

Philip Metres, Barrett Watten’s Bad History: A Counter-Epic of the Gulf War

○ Abstract: This essay situates Barrett Watten’s book-length poem Bad History against the debate between Jean Baudrillard and Christopher Norris regarding the proper position of the intellectual during the Persian Gulf War. Bad History provides a provisional third way, mobilizing both the paranoiac postmodernity of Baudrillard and the hyperrationality of Norris, in a poetry that refuses to extract itself from its own subjective position, a resistance that speaks beyond the limits of its own political group. Watten’s poem is the most sophisticated attempt to grapple with the Gulf War in part because it situates itself in the cultural milieu that enabled the war itself to take place: what Paul Virilio calls “Pure War”—that state of society whereby the real war is the constant preparation for war. By invoking and countering the epic mode through a poetics of interference, a subjectivity vacillating between complicity and resistance, and formal innovations (including use of footers, newspaper-like columns, and a hefty appendix), Bad History stands out as perhaps the most important poetry to emerge out of the Persian Gulf War. —pm

Temenuga Trifonova, Is There a Subject in Hyperreality?

○ Abstract: The article discusses a dominant trend in postmodernism toward the dissolution of subjectivity into something vague, unstable, fragmented, amorphic, and always impersonal. In line with the ethical appeal of Lyotard’s idea of the inhuman as a resistance to the tyranny of subjectivity, Baudrillard defines the...