Introduction

This issue of Theory & Event is a milestone of sorts — we begin our fifth year of publication. What began as a series of conversations over an email server in the autumn of 1995 has evolved to become one of the most widely disseminated and read journals in the field of contemporary theory. We’ve been pleased to become a place where interesting and important conversations that eschew the parochialism of national boundaries are occurring — as ongoing evidence, go directly to the exchange between Jacques Derrida and the participants in the Sydney seminar on justice, language, and the subject which leads this issue.

How might we begin to think more specifically about the various relationships between aesthetic aspirations and the politics of modernity? This issue presents three essays that, as diverse as they are, all grapple with crucial elements of this problem, without every succumbing to the (too easy) charge of the aestheticization of politics. As our lead essay we are delighted to publish Jane Bennett’s “Commodity Fetishism and Commodity Enchantment,” which both demonstrates and illustrates the ever contemporary fantastic connections between words and things. As amazing as this essay is, it is but a taste of Bennett’s recent work on enchantment and modernity to be published later this year. Jump, jive, and wail, indeed. Following on, Jodi Dean presents a major critique of technoculture, creatively deploying Zizek’s analysis of popular culture to undermine both the utopian aspirations of technofetishists and communicative theorists such as Habermas. Then in “Politics and Anxiety in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan,” William Sokoloff traces the distinction between fear and anxiety in Hobbes’s work, showing how the distinction can lead to a rereading, not only of Hobbes, but of the politics of the sublime.

Along with review essays addressing the relationship of Western feminism to globalization, recent attempts to think about Wittgenstein and political theory, and a new assessment of classical political economy, this issue of Theory & Event should prove to be at least as irresistible as, say, a new pair of khakis. We leave it to our readers to fill in the gaps.

This fifth year of publication also marks the final year of Tom Dumm’s term as a (founding) co-editor. We are very pleased to announce that Paul Patton of the University of Sydney has agreed to replace Tom and join Bill Chaloupka as co-editor. Paul is known as a rigorous and adventurous philosopher, whose translations of French thinkers has been a major service to the English speaking community, and whose own work— most recently, his book Deleuze and the Political — has propelled him to the front ranks of contemporary theorists. Paul’s affiliation with an Australian university should also send a signal to our readers that we are deeply committed to making Theory & Event speak in an idiom that tries to resist the hegemony of American pretensions of cosmopolitanism. We all look forward to the new turns the journal will take as he and Bill Chaloupka move forward.

We are also pleased to announce the addition of three new members to our board of co-ordinating editors. These include David Owen, of the University of Southhampton, whose work on Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Weber and postanalytical philosophy is gaining him a wide and appreciative audience, Jodi Dean, of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, whose books and essays on feminism and critical theory, and political theory and culture have been controversial in the very best sense of that term — against the grain of received wisdom, and Lisa Disch, whose work on Arendt and on issues of representation have been notable for the care and generosity of spirit.