Victor Li

NECROIDEALISM, OR THE SUBALTERN'S SACRIFICIAL DEATH

Dipesh Chakrabarty admits that the subaltern who wholly resists incorporation by dominant state forms is ‘an ideal figure,’ a utopian concept designating the limits of hegemonic thought. I wish to argue that such a utopian ideal may find its most convincing but problematic representation in the figure of the dead subaltern. In death, the subaltern is perfected as a concept so pure no living referent can contradict or complicate it. As in utopian thinking, it is the subalterns non-existence that ensures the possibility of its conceptualization as a critical alternative to existing hegemonies. Through a reading of Ranajit Guhas essay ‘Chandras Death’, Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things, and Amitav Ghoshs The Hungry Tide, I will show how the immortalization of the subaltern involves a troubling logic of sacrifice and necroidealization that replaces the messiness and ambiguity of struggle with the reassurance of an aestheticized political ideal.

The Untimely in Globalization's Time: Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis

Abstract Globalizations time is made possible through the elision or devaluation of other times and the attempt to control and foreclose the future through the technological acceleration of its own temporality. But global time remains haunted by traces of the non-global and the untimely. My paper will examine both the temporal framework capitalist globalization imposes on the world and the times outside that framework that, by their untimeliness, disturb globalizations time. I will focus my discussion on Don DeLillos Cosmopolis, a novel that not only provides us with a description of capitalist globalizations temporal regime but also tracks the disruptive emergence of the untimely. The untimely emerges as persistent anachronistic matter and the body in pain: both remain resistant to global capitalisms desire to annul time itself. My paper, therefore, attempts to make a case for heterotemporality against capitalist globalizations isochrony, which seeks to put an end to time.

Philology and Power: Ezra Pound and the Regulation of Language

Ezra Pounds university years were spent mostly in the study of medieval Romance languages and the philological techniques that interpreted them. At Hamilton College he studied under William Pierce Sheperd, Professor of Romance Languages, and at the University of Pennsylvania he worked for his Masters degree with Hugo Rennert, another scholar and philologist. His first book of criticism, originally lectures delivered at the Regent Street Polytechnic, was a study of

Toward an Inoperative Civilization

The unapologetic re-emergence in recent years of the term “civilization” in American foreign policy circles and best-selling books merits closer scrutiny. This essay examines two different views of civilization that have attracted recent critical attention. The first is a rather militant defense of civilization. In this view, civilized nations see themselves as exempt from the very laws and principles on which they are founded, thereby enabling them, in the name of the civilizing (or pro-democracy) mission, to exert force or violence on those others who threaten civilization (also known as “barbarians,” “savages,” “terrorists,” or “enemies of democracy”) and who also happen to be, conveniently, in a state of exception from civilization and can therefore be subjected to violence. The second model of civilization reflects a certain liberal optimism. Rather than precipitating “clashes,” civilization, in this view, does not confer exceptionality on a nation or allow for the exploitation of vulnerable others; instead, a civilization should concern itself with the expansion and fusion of horizons and the need to engage in a dialogue with other cultures and societies without exception or exclusion. In describing these two views, I note the violence inherent in the model of civilization as an exception and the difficulties that confront the dialogical model. Drawing on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, as well as J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, I conclude with some reflections on the need to revise our current views of civilization by sketching an alternative possibility of an inoperative civilization.

‘The poetry does not matter’: Four Quartets and the Rhetoric of Humility

Defending the use of ‘rhetoric’ in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry, T. S. Eliot argues for a clearer definition of the term which would take into account its expressive possibilities and its appropriateness to the circumstances of its use: ‘Let us avoid the assumption that rhetoric is a vice of manner, and endeavour to find a rhetoric of substance also, which is right because it issues from what it has to express’.1 As we shall see, the ‘substance’ which Eliot’s Four Quartets attempts to express, the characteristic rhetoric it adopts, is a rhetoric of humility. I hope to show, however, that it is a rhetoric not only in expressing a way of thinking or feeling; it is also a rhetoric in the sense of a discourse certain of its aim but unsure of its own ultimate validity. Humility is the attitude to adopt given that human understanding cannot hope to comprehend the ineffable nature of the Absolute. But this humility is also seen to put us on the way to that unknown Presence. However, since we can never completely know this Presence, our humility must consider its own impotence, its lack of that certainty guaranteed only by absolute truth. Humility is thus a rhetoric that both enables and disables the search for this truth.