Johns Hopkins University Press

Issue 15.2 of Theory & Event is a multi-platformed issue, comprised of two feature essays, one symposium inspired by the release of a new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, an intervention on Occupy Wall Street by Gavin Arnall, an exchange between Gijs van Oenen and Geert Lovink, and a robust set of reviews. But more than this, issue 15.2 raises the questions of contemporary conceits in our everyday political lives.

Wendy Brown raises the issue of conceits most strongly. Her essay diagnoses the civilizational delusions we bear in our assumptions about Western secularism, specifically with regard to the matter of how and why our thinking about secularism persistently focuses on certain cultural objects that are markers of modesty. Rather than taking a position on either the burqa or the bikini, and rather than simply unpacking their symbolic value (or potential lack thereof), Brown’s concern is to explore why and how Western liberal discourse about secularism is preoccupied with Islamic female modest dress, and how such preoccupations allow us “to comprehend features of Western secular discourse that make possible Western liberal democratic regulation of such dress.” Brown’s analysis exposes five conceits of liberal secularism and shows how these conceits render the bans on modest dress plausibly legitimate. The result is to push us to question the conceits of the discourse of legitimacy itself.

Janell Watson’s “Butler’s Biopolitics: Precarious Community” takes on another set of conceits in contemporary political theory. Here Watson does a close reading of recent work by Judith Butler and Roberto Esposito, focusing on (amongst a rich diversity of concepts) Butler’s account of precarity and Esposito’s account of communitas. The analytic of Watson’s argument unravels a certain economic conceit in these two thinkers that Watson hopes to unravel by making a final appeal to the necessity of “a more nurturing state and a more just economy.” For Watson, what is essential is not to theorize precariousness, but to fight social and economic precarity.

The Symposium on Simone de Beauvoir, co-edited by Kathy Ferguson and Lori Marso with an essay by each of them, also includes essays by Linda Zerilli, Diane Rubenstein, and Sally Markowitz. Each of the essays is both subtle and striking in its engagement with the work of de Beauvoir. As Ferguson notes in her introduction to the symposium, her encounter with de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was an earth-shattering – and “world-making” – event. For Ferguson, The Second Sex was such a rupture to familiar conceits that, she admits, “I did not know it was possible to think like that.” As Ferguson affirms at the conclusion of her introduction, the Symposium reconvenes the tools of feminist theory and critical theory Beauvoir helped to invent so as to think her work anew. The Symposium introduction can be accessed here.

The email exchange between Gijs van Oenen and Geert Lovink is about new media, interactivity, and interpassivity (widely discussed and reviewed in the Netherlands, van Oenen’s work is becoming more familiar to English-language readers; his essay “Interpassive Agency: Engaging Actor-Network-Theory’s View on the Agency of Objects” was published in Theory & Event 14.2). This interview/exchange forwards an elaboration of van Oenen’s critical reflections on interpassivity as – to quote his words – “a new turn or phrase in ‘the Dialectic of Enlightenment’” that elaborates the conceits of the cultural obsession with interactivity. Like Lady Gaga’s “stop calling!” ritornello on Telephone Song, van Oenen’s work shows how we are unable to bear the burden of a persistent interactivity that contemporary techno-society projects upon us.

All the editors of Theory & Event are grateful for the positive feedback we have received regarding our Occupy Wall Street Supplement (Theory & Event 14.4S). In issue 15.2, we keep open the space of the Occupy Wall Street event with reflections from Gavin Arnall He begins by asking a poignant question that emerges from debates within the movement, but that is crucial also for a theory of politics and a critical theory of judgment: Does an idea – he ponders – imply a demand? That is, is it in a concept’s conceit to contain the kernel of a demand?

Issue 15.2 concludes with five reviews: Jinee Lokaneeta reviews Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty; Hannah Frantzki reviews Berber Bevernage’s History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence; Tara Mulqueen reviews Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind; Paul Apostolidis reviews Kathi Weeks’ The Problem with Work; and Michael D. Snediker reviews Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Weather in Proust.

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