William Corlett

Containing Indeterminacy Problems of Representation and Determination in Marx and Althusser

Outside (though not completely so) the circuit of the international division of labor, there are people whose consciousness we cannot grasp if we close off our benevolence by constructing a homogeneous Other referring only to our own place in the seat of the Same or the Self. Here are subsistence farmers, unorganized peasant labor, the tribals, and the communities of zero workers on the street or in the countryside. To confront them is not to represent (vertreten) them but to learn to represent (darstellen) ourselves. Spivak (1988, 288-9)

Reflections on Time and Politics, by Nathan Widder. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. 224 pp.

recalls Henry VIII being named “Supreme Head of the Church of England” (Od. 11.476; fn 285). These moments are identified by Nelson’s annotations, which are helpful though could be more thoroughly developed. There are also typographical errors—catalogued in detail in a review in “Notes & Queries”— that should be corrected in the next edition. I do not agree with that review, however, that the edition is so unreliable that it should be withdrawn. Nelson has performed a service to scholars interested in Hobbes, sixteenthand seventeenth-century politics, and receptions of Homer by making accessible what had been largely lost. But Hobbes’ translations also reveal, however unintentionally, the extraordinary difficulty of taming great literature. Unlike Hobbes’ subjects, epic verse does not seem willing to yield so readily to the authority of epic theory.3

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One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs—Heraclitus. Play is always play of absence and presence, but if one wishes to think it radically, one must think it before the alternative of presence and absence; it is necessary to think of Being as presence or absence from the possibility of play on, and not the other way around—Derrida.