Introduction

Two of the essays in this issue stage critical encounters. In “Acclaim for Antigone's Claim Reclaimed (or, Steiner contra Butler),” John Seery seeks to rehabilitate George Steiner’s analysis of Sophocles’s Antigone in the face of Judith Butler’s criticisms of his (and others’) blind spots: lacunae Butler attributes to Steiner’s commitments to heteronormativity. Despite appreciating much of Butler’s unmasking of a tradition of Antigone interpretation from Hegel on, Seery criticizes her for neglecting those parts of Steiner’s treatment that do not in his view minimize the importance of incest in the tragedy after all. Rather than falling into the blindness that Butler sees in Steiner’s (as well as in others’) readings, Seery credits Steiner’s book with being responsible for inspiring the central question that Butler poses at the outset of her own chapter on “Promiscuous Obedience”, since he already points to the “incestuous web in Antigone.”

In “Cultural Psychoanalysis, or Theory, Resurrected,” RIPope considers Zizek’s Lacanian reading of Krzyzstof Kieslowski’s cinema, in order to promote a politically perspicuous version of cultural psychoanalysis. Where Zizek, according to Pope, sees Kieslowski’s cinema as merely disclosing the mechanism of sublimation, Pope argues that Kieslowski’s cinema actualizes and encourages the audience to engage in “the precise function of sublimation”, rather than merely displaying it à la David Lynch.

In other essays:

In “La Philosophie Americaine: James, Bergson, and the Century of Intercontinental Pluralism,” Kennan Ferguson challenges the “presumption that a European invading philosophy displaced the pragmatic truth-telling of the Anglo-American world.” Ferguson explores the linkages between the pluralisms of William James and Henri Bergson. He argues that inasmuch as James was an American philosopher he was also a European philosopher and that conversely, to the extent that Bergson was a European philosopher, he was also an American philosopher. In short, crudely dichotomizing interpretations that radically distance continental and American contributions are to be contested.

In “Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker,” finally, Alex Houen begins with Michel Foucault’s approach to governmentality. Here the focus is on the approach that emerged in his Society Must be Defended lectures, where power is framed in terms of war, struggle and the army rather than in terms of disciplines. It is this Foucauldian perspective of power-governmentality that Houen then uses to analyse the fiction of Kathy Acker, where he finds such a conception of power enacted. Special attention is paid in the article to her posthumously published novel Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective (2002). In general, Houen sees Acker’s texts as Foucault-inspired, particularly in her technique of writing the self, and he credits her with offering thereby a way of confronting contemporary power networks with an aesthetics of existence.

In our review section, Sharon Krause reviews William Connolly’s Neuropolitics; Michaele L. Ferguson reviews Samuel A. Chambers’ Untimely Politics, and Carsen Strathausen reviews Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey.