In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Michael J. Shapiro and Jodi Dean

Theory & Event 11:3 opens with Iain MacKenzie’s “What is a political event,” an essay that explores our journal’s founding thematic. He surveys epistemological issues related to “political events” as they arise in the writings of analytic philosophy (e.g., Davidson), hermeneutic philosophy (e.g., Ricoeur), and contemporary radical philosophy (e.g., Badiou and Deleuze). He then considers the political-eventual nature of 9/11 within the diverse positions he has surveyed, assessing the adequacy of each. MacKenzie concludes by arguing for a model of the political event that evades dominant conceptions of “the political.”

The essays that follow consider the ways contemporary neo-liberal worlds are haunted by structures of domination and how various critical responses reveal that haunting. Gonzalo Portocarrero’s “Transgression as a specific form of enjoyment in the criollo world” begins with a treatment of the fraught choice between tolerance of transgression and the taste for prohibition in Latin American societies and then focuses on Peruvian criollos who exists in a self-fashioned “moral order” that is in tension with traditional Peruvian “institutionality. “ Taking up various criollo practices of transgression against a background of Peru’s identity assemblages, Portocarrero notes the extent to which the struggle of criollos against traditional authority reveals the way they exist as “the Other” in a political reality that reflects the failure of decolonization.

Roberto Farneti’s essay, “The Horror of Self-Reflection: The Concealment of Violence in a ‘Self-conscious and Critical Society’“ raises the question of the compatibility of the principles of liberalism with the kind of reflexivity necessary for an emancipatory politics. He offers readings of Philip Roth’s novels to explore the ways people’s delusional habits inhibit their awareness of coercive social pressures and lock them into unreflected upon social roles. Farneti ends with some critical reflections on the relationships between politics and the psyche, especially the “violent and non-cognitive origins of human sociability,” as they are revealed in the fictional universes of the novels of such writers not only Roth but also Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow.

The primary vehicle for Vincent Lloyd’s “Law, Grace, and Race: The Political Theology of Manderlay” is an analysis of Lars von Trier’s 2005 film Manderlay. Treating the film as a critique of the efficacy of liberal politics and as an allegory of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Lloyd constructs their combined contributions to a critique of liberalism. He then adds to those two readings observations on the film’s implicit critique of political theology: von Trier forces the viewer to reevaluate understandings of the relationship between law and grace. Ultimately, Lloyd argues that Manderlay provides a provocation for political theorists to investigate law-grace relationships and to challenge problematic norms and conventions.

In her “Empire, Tragedy, and the Liberal State,” Jeanne Morefield provides a powerful critique of what she calls the “pro-imperial writings” of two public intellectuals, Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff, both of whom, she argues, support empire as a lesser evil than the political systems that are targeted by the U.S.’s military interventions. Mapping Ferguson’s “liberalism imperialism” and Ignatieff’s “anguish of ‘selfjustification’,” she shows the way their constructions of the Third World” echo the “stylistic narratives of liberal imperialists writing during the twilight of the British Empire.” Ultimately, Morefield shows how Ferguson’s and Ignatieff’s apologies for empire “obscure the dense and multilayered history of the relationship between liberalism and imperialism.”

With Paul Apostolidis’s essay, “Politics and Connolly’s Ethics: Immigrant Narratives, Racism, and Identity’s Contingency,” the issue moves from a critique of empire’s apologists to a focus on the victims of structures of global hegemony. Inspired by William Connolly’s writings, Apostolidis examines the critical capacities of political theory’s “ethical turn” with respect to the immiseration of the everyday working lives of immigrants in the US. Drawing especially on Connolly’s practice of “reflective genealogy,” Apostolidis primary subject matter is immigrant’s narratives of their experiences. He shows how the activation of affects in their storytelling provides a “catalytic genealogy” that “sets the stage for ethical practices among people who are systematically subjected...

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