Preface: On Hosting

One of the most exciting things editors can do is to hand the reigns of production over to others and invite them to populate the time and space of writing with vistas and words heretofore unimagined. Such hostings enable swerves in continuity, if not breaks all together. Or perhaps parallax sympathies are engendered between styles of organization. Certainly, what such occasions emphasize is a discontinuity of propriety; a discontinuity, that is, of the proper sense of how reading and writing, looking and listening, should be. In this issue of Theory & Event, we (the editors) are very fortunate to have been offered such an opportunity of hosting. It is with distinct pleasure and deep gratitude that with Issue 18.2 we present this editorial project on the oeuvre of Lars von Trier hosted, curated, and laboriously crafted by Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso. We leave all other introductory remarks to them [see Introduction: Lars von Trier and the “Clichés of Our Times”].

Issue 18.2 also includes a response and four reviews: Andrew A.G. Ross responds to Wendy Pearlman’s review of his Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict; Gitte du Plessis reviews Grégoire Chamayou’s Manhunts: A Philosophical History and Didier Fassin’s Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing; Lisa Disch reviews Lars Tønder’s Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics; Carolyn Pedwell reviews Elisabeth Anker’s Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom; and Jessica Whyte reviews Lauri Siisiäinen’s Foucault and the Politics of Hearing.