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  • Abstracts

Dana Cuff, Enduring Proximity: The Figure of the Neighbor in Suburban America

Abstract: The figure of the neighbor as metaphor, practice, and form is a lens through which we can read the postwar suburban landscape. In the residential sphere, the un-private, quasi-public space of the neighbor establishes our proximity with otherness in enduring, significant ways. As the ground for proto-political engagement, neighborhoods figure interiority and publicity, sameness and difference, intimacy and enmity. This essay places Levittown, and its mass-produced conformity, as the progenitor of more recent historicist, themed, community developments often taken as its opposites. The literal projection of neighborliness in the physical form of porches, park benches, and brick veneers simultaneously masks and controls discomfort with difference. By contrast, an early modernist housing tract projects an abstract field in which privacy and tolerance can be situated. The contemporary figure of the neighbor embodied in suburban spatial patterns articulates an anxiety over close-up encounters with strangers, and points toward ways to garner the political fruits of civility.—dc

Steven Helmling, During Auschwitz: Adorno, Hegel, and the “Unhappy Consciousness” of Critique

Abstract: This paper considers the hair-shirt ethos of T. W. Adorno’s writing practice in relation to the counterexample of Hegel, Adorno’s single most important “influence.” Adorno’s critique of modernity foregrounds the repression of affect, a theme allegorized in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) in the Homeric episode of Odysseus and the Sirens. Salient among the loci of Adorno’s critique is philosophy (sc. critique) itself, a project, and a “kind of writing,” heavily invested since Plato in an ethos of dispassion. Adorno sees in this an instance of the sundering of thought from feeling that he protested throughout his career. “The need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth,” he writes, thus committing his own critical labor to a textual effect, or affect, of a kind of critical “unhappy consciousness.” This last phrase comes, of course, from Hegel, but Hegel posits “unhappy consciousness” as part of humankind’s historical burden—that is, as part of the problem Hegel’s providential philosophical historicizing is meant to “solve.” To that end, Hegel not only diagnoses and prescribes against “unhappy consciousness,” but his own prose style achieves a serenity or “optimism” that many take as evidence of a false or ideological consciousness in Hegel, a Panglossian “imaginary solution to a real contradiction.” Adorno shares this reservation about Hegel (and about the after-effects of his optimism in Soviet triumphalism). In Adorno’s own writing, what I call an “after Auschwitz,” or indeed a “during Auschwitz” imperative, prescribes a tone, an affect, quite the reverse of Hegel’s, despite Adorno’s patent indebtedness to Hegel. The essay links these stylistic contrasts to Adorno’s and Hegel’s differing speculations as, in effect, psychologists of “unhappy consciousness,” and with Adorno’s troubled relation to the theme of Utopia.—sh

Christopher Kocela, Unmade Men: The Sopranos After Whiteness

Abstract: An implicit assumption of much work in whiteness studies is that to heighten white racial awareness—particularly about the sometimes “invisible” privileges that whiteness affords—is to engage in a form of anti-racist practice. This essay reads the HBO television series The Sopranos in light of recent efforts (like those of Mike Hill and Ruth Frankenburg) to rethink the functioning of white racial identification in an age in which the “end of whiteness” is frequently proclaimed both inside and outside academia. By focusing on the way in which the series’ protagonist, Tony Soprano, strategically affirms and denies his status as white, the essay argues that The Sopranos foregrounds the historically disavowed relationship between Italian-American identity and whiteness, while also revealing how the celebration of ethnic difference can be used to preserve white privilege. The essay then argues, given Tony’s frequent appeal to various lost symbolic fathers, the need for a psychoanalytic understanding of white racial (mis)identification. Using the Lacanian model of race developed by Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, the essay explains Tony’s recurring panic attacks as evidence of racial anxiety brought about by the foreclosure of his desire for a cultural master-signifier of whiteness. The essay concludes by...

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