Introduction

Correction:
On page 588, the last sentence of the third paragraph was updated to read: What Restuccia calls Agamben's “ontology of nudity” thus contests Heidegger’s tendencies toward “fracture, privation, and exclusion.”

Things are ordered, but so are events and theories. The essays in our summer issue concern the way that ordering plays out across history and through politics. Although ordering always poses as having an intrinsic and irrefutable logic, as being both internally consistent and inevitable, these essays show that ordering is itself often a force of chaos, which becomes rationalized after the fact. By looking at this more subversive understanding of ordering, the writers in this issue argue that the putatively standard and normative are often political, arbitrary, or predetermined. Thus, we have depictions of Cold War mothers taking on the very aspects of militant aggression that their role is normally meant to suffer passively—characterizations and stereotypes that release and transform, rather than stultify, various forms of representation, and various understandings of race and debt that often work at cross purposes to their original intention and foci.

In her “Honor Among Spies …”, Smita Rahman explores how motherhood, honor, and spying are all richly entangled in the contemporary TV drama The Americans, a show that mines US history to clarify today’s orderings of gender and geopolitics. For Rahman, the character of Elizabeth Jennings subverts the standard conception of honorable spying as an intrinsically masculine trope. In epitomizing both the fealty of a Soviet agent and a concerned Cold War American mother, Russell’s character represents a blurring of traditional roles, turning the passive portrayal of a Cold War era wife into a weaponized and radicalizing other form of identity and agency. Here, clear-cut distinctions that are fundamental to the political messaging underlying most depictions of the Cold War are circumvented and the questions of honor and loyalty no longer have a clear and determined object (or subject).

Gideon Baker’s “Cynical Cosmopolitanism” turns to Ancient Greece to recapture antinationalism, reading the cynicism of Diogenes as an attempt to break out from the polis (hence, “cosmopolitan”). This version of cynicism works through a connection to phusis which Baker contrasts to kosmos, a term later favored by the Stoics. As Baker shows, phusis is based on what is (and hence should not simply be translated as “nature,”) while kosmos is more about a wish for a well-ordered—if unreal—universe. For this reason, Baker tells us that Diogenes’ version of cynicism is far more rooted in actual political practices. This cynicism delivers to the cosmopolitanism an idea of the kosmos that it seems to promise but does not actually achieve. This has critical implications for the kind of politics that we practice, whether it is the apolis of Diogenes or some kind of order grounded in imagined ideas about nature and sovereign authority.

Orderings also involve disproportionalities. In “Overloading, Incongruity, Animation …”, Eric Herhuth looks at the role of caricaturization as a form of political location. Whereas caricature works through exaggeration and distortion, it actually produces a kind of “hypernormalization” in which it is precisely these exaggerated features that constitute standard representations. Although caricaturization often serves to create stereotypes and leads to deeply problematic politics, for Herhuth there is also something potentially subversive about caricature. Reading this question through Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing as,” Herhuth shows how caricaturization can transform and alter as much as it normalizes, often with potentially radical results.

In “The Multitude in the Mirror …”, Diego Fernández Peychaux re-examines Hobbes’ notion of the multitude (much discussed by Hardt and Negri). For Fernández Peychaux, the idea of the multitude is an answer to readers who tend to see Hobbes as a theorist of autarkic individualism. The multitude in Hobbes is not a series of isolated individuals working in tangent; it is actually a rhetorical—hence material—connection where selves overlap and agency is something collective. In doing so, Fernández Peychaux furthers work on Hobbes in which language and materiality become deeply interconnected. It is only by understanding such terms, Fernández Peychaux argues, that we can understand the kinds of political...