Timothy S. Murphy

Introduction: Old and New Weird

The introduction to this special issue proposes a three-stage periodization for the development of weird fiction, the unstable hybrid of horror, science fiction, and fantasy most often associated with H. P. Lovecraft: Old Weird (1880–1940), which is centered on Lovecrafts literary and critical work and the pulp magazine Weird Tales that gave the genre its name; Weird Transition (1940–80), a period marked by the apparent decline of the genre but that actually sees the migration of weird elements into a broad range of genre and media practices; and New Weird (1980–present), which critiques the Old Weirds reactionary politics by adopting a radically affirmative perspective on the body and the alien. During the New Weird period, philosophy and critical theory are also infected with weird elements of nihilism and radical antihumanism, as in the speculative realist school. This historical perspective reveals the weird to be a form of “pulp modernism” that is irreducible to high modernism or postmodernism

Supremely Monstrous Thought: H. P. Lovecraft and the Weirding of World Literature

This essay draws out the antipopulist and antinationalist implications of H. P. Lovecrafts cosmic antihumanism by tracing how his fiction (especially the tales At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow out of Time) deploys forms of representational inscription—maps, mural sculptures, and writing—to undermine the conceptual and historical basis of the nation-state and its founding subject, the people, and thereby to delegitimate the international political order and the disciplinary logic of world literature that reflects that order, both of which are predicated on the dialectical transcendence of nationalist traditions.

Morbid Symptoms: An Interview with China Miéville

In this wide-ranging interview, the New Weird novelist and critic China Mieville offers an account of weird fictions liminal status as a countertradition that problematizes the critical divisions between science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In driving the rationalist positivism that generates these generic divisions toward a traumatic antihumanist nihilism, the weird generates not only a new teratology focused on the tentacle but also the possibility of an unexpected way out of the postmodern impasse of proliferating irony and self-reflexivity.

How (Not) to Translate an Unidentified Narrative Object or a New Italian Epic

The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that the notion of the New Italian Epic, a concept that is equal parts genre (or metagenre) definition and periodization proposal, and which was introduced into Italian literary studies by the Wu Ming collective in 2008, can help critics and scholars of Anglo-American literature to map the contemporary literary landscape, a landscape that lies beyond post-modernism and its characteristic genres (historiographic metafiction, New or Gonzo Journalism, etc.). I will first briefly situate the New Italian Epic historically and conceptually, and then, after discussing how not to translate it into English-language generic terms, will explicate its most prominent practitioners’ definition of its salient features. I will conclude by proposing a useful English-language translation framework for it and then applying that to the fiction of American writers David Foster Wallace and William S. Burroughs.

Self-nomination and autonomy: a reply to Ben Trott

This is a reply to:Trott, Ben. 2013. “From the precariat to the multitude.” Global Discourse. 3 (3–4): 406–425. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2013.876714.

The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy

Having pioneered the importation of edgy French and German theory into the United States during the eighties and nineties, Sylvère Lotringer’s guerilla publishing house Semiotext(e) has recently turned its attention to Italian thought. Its venerable Foreign Agents series, which first attracted attention both within and outside the academy for its presentation of thinkers like Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Heiner Müller in inexpensive pocket-sized paperbacks, has been reinvented as a trade-format series (at higher prices) with a significant – though not exclusive – focus on the writings of contemporary Italian theorists like Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno and, the subject of this review, Franco Berardi. As it had done with respect to French and German theory, Semiotext(e) focuses not so much on established Italian intellectuals like Giorgio Agamben or Gianni Vattimo as on key thinkers who are not yet well known in the English-speaking world. Berardi is a case in point: he was originally trained as a painter and became widely known throughout the Italian counterculture of the seventies by the nickname ‘Bifo’, with which he signed his canvasses. Among his more important accomplishments are the founding in 1975 of the journal A/traverso, which became the primary organ of Bologna’s creative ‘Movement of ’77’; his involvement in the establishment of pioneering ‘free radio’ station Radio Alice in Bologna in 1976; and his participation in the setup and dissemination of OrfeoTV and the larger network of ‘Telestreet’ or ‘televisioni di strada’, small-scale ‘pirate’ television transmitters, from 2002 to 2006. Although he has been an influential writer, media activist and cultural provocateur for forty years, his work has only recently become readily available in English. Bifo was also an early participant in the Italian political movement called Operaismo, or workerism, though in his recent writings he prefers to christen it ‘compositionism’ after what he considers its most important methodological innovation: the phenomenological and structural study of the subjective composition of the working class. In The Soul at Work he offers a very condensed critical history of compositionism by means of a contrast between it and two other major currents of sixties and seventies radicalism: Marxist humanism (represented by Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre) and Althusserian structuralism. Decrying Althusser’s antisubjectivism, Bifo follows the mutating line of radical subjectivity from the worker–student alliance of 1968 to the contemporary ‘cognitive worker’ without hypostatizing the transhistorical subjective essence that humanism, Marxist or otherwise, seeks to restore or recover. Compositionism insists on the ontological agency and political priority of the militant subject, but it views that subject as a discontinuous collective construction and not as an essence. Thus the subject’s struggle is not to escape alienation and rediscover its original perfection but to assert its creative autonomy, its ability to reconstruct itself anew in response to new material and social conditions. Like other militant Italian thinkers who emerged from compositionism (such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno), Bifo interprets contemporary capitalism as the ongoing attempt to capture the creativity of the intellectually specialized and self-disciplining working class that emerged during the sixties and seventies to throw the old industrial order into crisis. The contemporary Book reviews

Flower of the Desert: Poetics as Ontology from Leopardi to Negri

Over the past decade Antonio Negri has become widely influential as a theorist of globalization. His concepts of empire and multitude, elaborated in collaboration with Michael Hardt, derive from the analysis of the impact that linguistic performance and communications networks have had on economic production, political representation, and resistance. However, that focus on language and communications is a recent and poorly understood development in Negris long career. This article traces Negris recent interest in the power of language and communications, as well as his recent alliance with the Nietzschean poststructuralism of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, to Lenta ginestra (1987), his massive study of the Italian Romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi. Negri finds in Leopardis work not only a sophisticated philosophy of language but also a materialist ontology of the human imagination that opposes the dialectical tradition of idealist rationality associated with Kant and Hegel. Leopardis thinking parallels Nietzsches in several important ways: both offer a critique of dialectical concepts of historical progress; both attack the rise of nationalism and its administrative control over life; and both conceive of subjectivity as a process of creation or poiesis. The engagement with Leopardi has allowed Negri to identify crucial and productive points of intersection between his own Marxist project and the Nietzschean projects of Foucault and Deleuze, and thereby to develop his powerful model of globalization