Introduction

It is our pleasure to begin Issue 13.4 of Theory & Event by announcing – and officially welcoming – the four new members of our Coordinating Editors Board: Steven Johnston, of the University of South Florida; Aletta Norval, of the University of Essex; Kam Shapiro, of Illinois State University, and Elizabeth Wingrove, of the University of Michigan. Elected at our annual meeting (held at the most recent American Political Science Association conference in Washington D.C., 2010), these four new members promise to bring much enthusiasm and energy to an already enthusiastic and energetic Editorial Board.

It is also our great pleasure to introduce the journal's newly appointed Review Editor, James Martel, of San Francisco State University. Welcome James!

This means that Issue 13.4 also marks the last issue that Kennan Ferguson will serve as Review Editor of Theory & Event. In this regard, and on behalf of the entire Editorial Board of Theory & Event, we would like to extend our profound gratitude to Kennan, not only for the excellent job that he has done over the past several years as Review Editor – bringing to all our attentions unique and compelling political theory work done throughout the world and in diverse disciplines – but also for his counsel, his leadership, and his generosity.

Issue 13.4 begins with a hauntingly compelling article by Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim entitled, "Breakfast with the Dictator: Memory, Atrocity, and Affect." In this article, Lim recounts his breakfast interview with Noun Chea, the chief ideologue of the Khmer Rouge, prior to Chea's arrest on charges of crimes against humanity by the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal. Describing this encounter as an "affective intersection of haptic space with places of memory," Lim proceeds to theorize the importance and often overlooked dimension of affect in memory, in and through haptic spaces of memorializing.

Our second article, entitled "Epistemological Reflections on Minor Points in Deleuze," written by Carsten Strathausen, engages the epistemological problems raised by Gilles Deleuze's philosophical ontology of lines. "Deleuze is a philosopher of lines, not points," Strathausen announces in his first sentence. Simply put, this means that Deleuze forgoes punctuality in favor of the line's dynamism. More than merely announcing Deleuze's execution of epistemology, however, Strathausen's essay proceeds to elaborate how this epistemological innovation grounds Deleuze's ontology of becoming.

The fourth Symposium of Volume 13, "A Return to the Senses," collects some of the papers presented at the first international Theory & Event conference, held at Trent University (May 7-9, 2009) entitled, "A Return to the Senses: Political Theory and the Sensorium." In various ways, the Symposium contributors engage the relationship between the senses and our practices of political thinking. They do not simply "return," however. Rather, the articles by Roger Cook, Mark Coté, Theo Davis, Dean Mathiowetz, Kam Shapiro, and Christina Tarnopolsky mark a renewed turn to the senses in light of recent debates that address the complex ways in which the human sensorium is not reducible to given modes of perception. These articles – which range in topics from the sensorial dimensions of new media (Coté) to a political genealogy of dandyism (Cook), from Harriet Jacobs' "Excrescences" (Davis) to the hapticity of luxury (Mathiowetz), to Wordsworth's program for a popular poetry (Shapiro), and Plato's practice of disrupting conventions of the sensible (Tarnopolsky) – all provide new and heretofore unacknowledged encounters with the sensorial and aesthetic dimensions of political life. The Introduction to the Symposium is openly accessible and is available here.

To close off this issue, our Reviews section – co-edited by our outgoing Review Editor, Kennan Ferguson, and our newly appointed Review Editor, James Martel – offers the following book reviews: Shatema Threadcraft of Rutgers University reviews J. Kameron Carter's Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008); J. Jesse Ramírez of Yale University reviews Slavoj Žižek's Living in the End Time (Verso, 2010); Philip Abbott of Wayne State University reviews Peter Y. Paik's From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Liam Sionnach of The Institute for Experimental Freedom reviews Tiqqun's Introduction to Civil War (Semiotexte, 2010); and, Paul A. Passavant of Hobart and William Smith Colleges reviews Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Commonwealth (Harvard University Press, 2009).