Introduction

In the shadow of the verdict that George Zimmerman was not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin, Theory & Event has made our Trayvon Martin Symposium, originally published in issue 15.3, openly accessible. Readers who do not subscribe to Project Muse, or who do not have institutional access to it, can enjoy free access to those articles for a limited time. Feel free to share widely and include as readings for courses.

Issue 16.3 leads with Morton Schoolman’s compelling elaboration and development of Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory. This essay is a part of a larger and ambitious attempt by Schoolman to theorize the event of a democratic enlightenment. Crucial to this effort is the reconciliation image produced by an aesthetic form of reason standing in alterity to instrumental rationality. At once provocative and counterintuitive, Schoolman develops the idea of the reconciliation image as it could be discovered in the multi-layered dimensions of filmic experience. His objective is to loosen Adorno’s critical conception of aesthetic reason from its tether to modernist art and thus to mitigate the story of inevitable societal decline so readily available in his articulations of modern culture. In its stead, Schoolman suggests that the reconciliation image circulates ubiquitously in film to create the possibility of a democratic enlightenment.

Sonali Chakravarti’s analysis of the Gacaca experiment in Rwanda explores its challenges, its failures, and the opportunities for transitional justice emerging from it. As she describes it, gacaca (“justice on the grass”) was ambitious in both scope and expectations. Now, on the fringes of its conclusions, it has been harshly attacked as inadequate in its punishment of the perpetrators and as a tool of authoritarian propaganda. Rather than stuck within such facile appraisals, Chakravarti’s essay moves between gacaca’s flaws and possibilities in order to elaborate the potential for reflecting on the experimental spaces and temporalities for transitional justice.

The third feature essay of this issue is Jemima Repo’s “The Life Function: The Biopolitics of Sexuality and Race Revisited.” Repo explores the strategies and tactics of difference production in Michel Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended. The site of her intervention is the intersection of race and death, and the place of sexuality for the theorization of biopolitics therein. Repo elaborates the counterintuitive thesis that “sexuality carries out a ‘life function’ that ensures the reproduction of the species through the problematization of sexuality.”

We are especially excited to offer Theory & Event readers the opportunity to engage the materials edited by Craig Lundy and Paul Patton for the “Deleuze in China” Symposium. In May of 2012, 90 scholars congregated in Kaifeng City in Henan Province at Henan University for a conference on the work of Gilles Deleuze. Speakers from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan participated with scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia. This was the first conference of its kind to be held in China, and it marked a new phase for the translation of Deleuze’s thoughts and concepts into the many languages of East Asia. The Symposium introduction is open access and can be viewed here: Deleuze in China: Editor's Introduction.

In tandem with the traditional book review section (see below), this issue of Theory & Event also includes a review essay by Mark Reinhardt entitled “Theorizing the Event of Photography: Recent Work on the Visual Politics of Violence and Terror.” Reinhardt’s piece covers a series of recent books on the subject of photography, visuality, and their relationship to politics. He considers how visual depiction acts back upon the collective in ways that both form and subvert our ways of thinking about certain events. The books he treats deal with a variety of images, perhaps most famously the image of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. In each case, the authors attempt to show how photography and other forms of imagery, including digital imagery, are not merely neutral vehicles for conveying information but instead act, as Reinhardt puts it, as “ghosts spirits, or dreams” which haunt and complicate our political landscape. Reinhardt depicts both the potential and sometimes the failure of the books he reviews to revisit and rethink these visual forms. In doing so, he points to a way to think about visual imagery that maximally alters the received political landscape of which it is a part.

Issue 16.3 concludes with three book reviews: Donald V. Kingsbury reviews George Ciccariello-Maher’s We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan; Gent Carrabregu reviews Ella Myers’ Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World; and, Mark Schaukowitch reviews Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine.