Rei Terada

Toy medium : materialism and modern lyric

What begins with an unlikely collection of unrelated phenomena--mechanical dolls, weather, atoms, lyric poetry--blossoms in the course of Toy Medium into a subtle and persuasive meditation on one of Western philosophys biggest puzzles: the relation of mind and matter. What is the role of the imagination in defining material substance? In a dazzling study of the poetics of materialist philosophy and of the materialism of lyric poetry, Daniel Tiffany traces the historical conjunction of matter and metaphor through a remarkable range of topics: automata in classical antiquity and the eighteenth century; Keplers treatise on snowflakes; animal magnetism; fireworks and cloud-chamber photographs; the origins of the microscope as a philosophical toy and its bearing on the figure of the virtuoso. At critical junctures in modern Western culture, Tiffany finds uncanny parallels between the metaphorics of science and visions of material substance rooted in popular culture and lyric poetry. Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000

Living a ruined life: De Quincey beyond the worst

Suspiria de Profundis explores the territory beyond trauma: De Quincey claims to have fully absorbed the intolerable in the form the death of his sister Elizabeth. By this logic, Suspiria accounts for what happens when the mind does understand what no one should be able to understand. Mirroring rather than anticipating trauma theory, De Quincey describes a realm in which full understanding cannot lead to metabolization and moving on, and working through is undesirable and impossible. Instead, Suspiria attacks supposedly inevitable categories of nature which are overshadowed by the reality of Elizabeths death, including male/female difference and the animal/human distinction. De Quinceys death writing thereby produces an unnatural and often explicitly queer alternative to working through loss.

The Racial Grammar of Kantian Time

ABSTRACT This essay reconsiders Kant’s “Analogies of Experience” in The Critique of Pure Reason to show how Kant’s grounding of perception in temporally understood cause and effect helps to institutionalize a racialized grammar that continues in globalization today. Kant’s proof establishes subjective and non-subjective beings in a hierarchical cause and effect relation which is also a consecutive relation in time. One can recognize in Kant’s procedures a logic that underlies enlightenment notions of history, race, and globalization. Tracing Kant’s logic can help us to see how race is embedded in interlocking pieces of the apparatus of universal exchange, even where it is not named.

Hegel and the Prehistory of the Postracial

This article examines Hegel’s theory of race in light of the “post-racial.” I mean “post-racial” in two senses: in both the actual erasure of racialized violence and the logical necessity of having to define race in the act of claiming its erasure. In this double light, Hegel’s claim of the superiority of structural to moral thinking can be seen to underwrite a racialized sublation of race. Reading Hegel with and against Kant, Lacan, and Žižek, this article demonstrates that Hegels very process of historical supersession then models the post-racialization of race.