Introduction

This issue of Theory & Event leads with a series of three essays addressing what, for lack of a better term, may still, if with trepidation be called universals. But these universals, as familiar as they might appear at first glance to traditional theorists, come back to us as theory’s alienated thoughts, to use an Emersonian turn of phrase.

Talal Asad critically investigates how human rights function, cutting through both the hypocrisy of Western states discourses about rights and the sometimes misplaced energies of those who attack that hypocrisy to arrive at a new, and nuanced understanding, not only of rights, but of the universalism that might accompany rights.

Jason Glynos gives us a telling sketch of the shift, in Lacanian thought, from an ethics of desire to an ethics of the drive, and points to the repercussions the foregrounding of jouissance may have for post-Marxist political theory as it attempts to constitute an ethics of the political, from Laclau to Derrida to Zizek.

Catherine Holland takes on the question of liberal toleration by seeking to purge it of the archaic elements of intolerance with which it is imbued. Mapping Ira Katznelson’s (and by proxy John Locke’s) closures of toleration at crucial moments of political crisis, and endorsing Katznelson’s moment toward identifying repoliticizing moments in a critical inquiry into the constitution of politics itself, Holland seeks to rehabilitate one liberalism’s most (blindly) celebrated and disparaged concepts to make it make sense in a pluralized world.

Moving from these discussions of concrete universals to the particulars of circumstance, we feature Erin Manning’s examination of a large land mass to the north of the United States of America. “I Am Canadian,” cries Joe of the Molson advertisement. Canadian nationalism is figured, she argues, in representations of landscape as much as in the literatures of the nation. As such, an examination of Canadian national identity affords an opportunity to think about alternative paths through the debate on identity.

Finally, Sara Knox provides a systematic reading of the meaning of crime in the contemporary context of hyper-media, providing a groundbreaking analysis of the continuing role of crime in shaping late modern culture. Connecting the role of revelation in genres of crime detection to the world-shaping function of fascination, and both to the brittle fragility of transparency associated with the exposure of crime, “World of Glass” holds up a mirror to the continuing human attempt to comprehend culture within the frame of good and evil.

In the Reviews section, Michael J. Shapiro reviews Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta and Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Works of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton.

Andrew J. Seligsohn reviews Kennan Ferguson, The Politics of Judgment: Aesthetics, Identity, and Political Theory.

Susan Hekman reviews Eloise Buker, Talking Feminist Politics: Conversations on Law, Science, and the Postmodern and Melissa A. Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically.

Kam Shapiro reviews Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire and Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Bill Chaloupka and Thomas Dumm, coeditors