MLN

Sussman, Henry.
Freeze-frame: An Essay-Review
MLN - Volume 117, Number 5, December 2002 (Comparative Literature Issue), pp. 1106-1116

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Henry Sussman - Freeze-frame: An Essay-Review - MLN 117:5 MLN 117.5 (2002) 1106-1116 Freeze-frame: An Essay-Review Henry Sussman Tom Cohen, Ideology and Inscription: "Cultural Studies" after Benjamin, de Man and Bakhtin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 258 pages. The exactions of launching a critical broadside have never been more demanding. Theoretically grounded work loses its caché of the moment, if it is not powered by meticulous close readings, worked through, where possible, to the syllabic and even sub-syllabic levels. At the same time, the critical work needs to address some broader trends or arguments prevailing in the marketplace of conceptual models, lest the microscopic analysis be dissipated in a jouissance of poetic articulation. Given the basic commerce in tropes and other metasignifiers that we have been conducting in our readings over the past thirty years, it's not always easy to locate the rhetorico-conceptual "handle" with which to name and orchestrate the polemical flank or register of a critical performance. In Ideology and Inscription, Tom Cohen, a seasoned critic with remarkable philosophical acuity and scholarly erudition, demonstrates the intellectual athleticism necessary for a commentary authentically adding to our understanding, on polemical as well as microscopic levels, even in a theoretical milieu thick with its prior innovations. As the passage of the years and the sheer demands of philosophically rigorous...