Fabienne Collignon

The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Agamben, and the Writers of the No

The proposition of Aaron Hillyer’s The Disappearance of Literature is to investigate ‘a specific gestural literary tendency’ in the work of the writers of the No, namely those writers that follow Maurice Blanchot’s ‘intuition’ (16) – or injunction – to lead literature towards its disappearance. What this means is this: the literature of the future resists the established powers that be, of language and subjectivity; it questions its own existence – which it ceaselessly contests, hence forming a Derridean injunction more than an intuition, whose politics is that of upheaval, resistance. The future, then, is defined as an utopian/anarchic ‘to come’, a time in which an entirely different order of existence is (imagined to be) in operation: a way of writing, out of this world, so as to approach a potential of being. The disappearance of literature comes with, and demands, a radical passivity, deconstruction (though Derrida remains fairly peripheral, largely an absent presence, in this analysis), desubjectification and the desire, to refer to Blanchot, for ‘communication without reticence’ (8). Hillyer, consequently, pays attention to:

Atomic-Antarctic Terminal Zone

ABSTRACT This article is concerned with the emergence of proto-cybernetic gadgets and specimen in Antarctica. The essay’s starting point is that the Cold War was literalised at the South Pole, which also operates as a shadowy double of the overtly militarised Arctic. What happens in Antarctica is a secret assimilation of space into the American Cold War perimeter by way of weapons technology, most notably through the gyrocompass (which develops into the black box navigation systems for ballistic missiles) and the man–machine amalgamation. This assimilation and emergence are traced at hand of exploration narratives (Harold Ponting; Douglas Mawson; Richard Byrd) as well as science fiction stories (H. P. Lovecraft; John W. Campbell, Jr.) that precede the Cold War, but whose forging of a superman-specimen anticipate the conceptualisation of Antarctica as a Cold War space. The South Pole operates as zone of rehearsal for superpower merging: the explorers become prototype cyborgs whose expeditions point towards the containment culture, epitomised in the gyrocompass/black box technology, of the Cold War.

Cold-Pac Politics: Ubik’s Cold War Imaginary

In a recent paper on the undead, Roger Luckhurst talks about the redefinition of death that occurred in the 1960s, more precisely in 1968, by way of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School, which changed the locus of death from the heart to the brain.1 The means for this renegotiation of death was biotechnology, the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and a new generation of artificial respirators, technologies of the body or of medico-corporate systems that lengthen the time of death at the same time that they commercialize it and commodify the body from the inside out.2 This redefinition of death was due to the machine, a deliberately generic term to gesture beyond this moment of the 1960s, towards techno-culture’s extensive associations with the occult, forming the missing link in ongoing processes of technologization.3 One of the main reasons the Ad Hoc Committee proposed an alternative interpretation of death was organ transplantation: the brain is the one organ that can’t be transplanted.

A Defence of Daylight

This edited collection, assembled by John Armitage and Ryan Bishop, focuses on the ‘visual domain’ in Paul Virilio’s work, which is always concerned ‘with movement, speed, time, the built environment, technology and their complex interactions, resulting in the constantly increasing militarisation of all aspects of daily life’ (p.2). The questions raised, as such, relate or refer – as they do in Virilio’s work – to battlefield perception, the act of taking aim through ‘images department[s]’ of so-called democratic states, engaged in ‘pure war’, endless war whose conquest also occurs endo-psychically. Hence the imperative to put under scrutiny knowledge production, world rendition, through technologies of vision which are, at the same time, technologies of targeting; it is the early, most influential writings like Speed and Politics (1977), The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1980) and War and Cinema (1984) that form ground zero, or points of eternal return, of this essay collection, which nevertheless covers a range of Virilio’s work. The objective is to provide investigations into contemporary culture informed by Virilio’s thinking over the course of his extensive ‘corpus’ of work, invariably attentive to the ‘thanatopolitics’ of said culture: the ‘logistics of perception’ that make the planet spectacularly visible.

We Are All Spectators; A Philosophical Cosmopolitanism That Is Yet To Come; Vanishing Points

Spectatorship constitutes the new focus in Jacques Rancière’s continuous interrogation of the ground that supports our understanding of the efficacy of the arts ‘to change something in the world we live in’ (p.29). In Le spectateur émancipé he calls into question the recurrent production of pitiable spectators in the Western critical tradition and its contemporary mutations. The book is particularly engaging in its fierce stance against practices of intellectual paternalism in art and philosophy. Rancière repeatedly portrays numerous authors as pathologists who presuppose that the spectacle ‘weakens the heads of the children of the people’ (p.52), or that too many images ‘soften the brains of the multitude’ (p.105). The emphasis on the pseudo-medical veneer of cultural expertise stresses that what is at stake in this book is not a mere affair of intellectual condescension but the complete incapacitation of the spectators. The five conference papers composing this volume effectively dismantle the all too often characterization of the spectator as a malade of passivity and ignorance in order to vehemently affirm that spectatorship is a capacity of all and anyone.