Daniel Grausam

Introduction: A Caveat on Caveats

In this introduction to part 4 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal’s editor assesses the argument made by Peace, the spokesperson of Erasmus in his Querela Pacis (1521), that the desire to impute and avenge wrongs against oneself is insatiable and at the root of both individual and social enmities. He notes that, in a symposium about how to resolve and prevent enmity, most contributions have to date expressed caveats about how justice and truth must take precedence over peace, how recovery from ill treatment may be impossible, how quietism is not a moral option, and how realism demands a national policy and a personal strategy of, at best, contingent forgiveness. He concedes that the attitudes of those opposed to quietism are healthy but suggests that there may be goods worthier than health of human devotion. This essay concludes that the main differences between what it terms “judgmental” and “irenic” regimes are disagreements over anthropology and metaphysics. The presumptions that truths are objectively knowable and that human beings are moral and rational agents characterize judgmental regimes; irenic regimes are characterized by disillusionment with those assumptions.

The Multitemporal Contemporary: Colson Whitehead’s Presents

Colson Whitehead is one of the most celebrated contemporary American novelists, and in this chapter I make four interrelated claims about his fiction: (1) his speculative novels productively frustrate any clear notion of a chronotope by representing the present as multitemporal, and thus complicate, in original ways, any understanding of the concept of the “contemporary”; (2) That this commitment to a multitemporal present helps us understand how Whitehead’s work differs from postmodern antecedents; (3) That Whitehead understands this multitemporal layering as the result of economic issues; and (4) That his non-speculative works look to the neoliberal revolutions of the Reagan/Thatcher era as the cause of this curious post-postmodern sense of the present.

Imagining Postnuclear Times

This essay compares “expert” attempts, commissioned by the US government, to imagine future nuclear risk with the attempt made by Lydia Millet in her novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005). During the Cold War, nuclear attack was conceptualized primarily as a matter of instantaneous, remainderless destruction—a destruction so total that it would annihilate any position from which it could be assessed or measured—and that conception has a lingering hold even now, a generation later. Recent attention has shifted, however, to the equally problematic issue of how to imagine the long-term, even posthuman risks posed by radioactive waste. Conventional models of risk and threat are inadequate to thinking through the problems of temporality raised by nuclear materials: those problems may well require the speculative resources of fiction if we are even to begin conceptualizing them. Millet’s novel is read as an attempt to imagine these threats and problems and to conceive of how we might think our way beyond them.