Father Knows Best

In his essay, Althusser\u27s Mirror, Carsten Strathausen reveals the paternal politics inherent to any gesture of appropriation. Molding Lacan to an Althusserian mirror, Strathausen demonstrates parallels between Lacan\u27s mirror stage and Althusser\u27s interpellated subject. The resemblance, created through what Strathausen suggests is Althusser\u27s mis-reading of Lacan, reveals their mutual influence. The question of influence, however, becomes an issue of tradition Althusser links to a politics of legitimacy and right he associates with a figure of paternity. While the process of filiation would seem to extend from Lacan to Althusser in the logic of the mirror employed by Strathausen to renew Marxist thought, Althusser also situates himself as the father to a Lacan he is attempting to salvage from the ignominy of illegitimacy

Investigating the Special: The Symbolic Function of the Independent Counsel

Symposium on Law, Morality, and Popular Culture in the Public Sphere at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, April 6, 2001

Investigating the Special: The Symbolic Function of the Independent Counsel

Symposium on Law, Morality, and Popular Culture in the Public Sphere at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, April 6, 2001

Juvenile Cosmology; Or Richard Powers’ Post-Global Doughnut

Le roman de Richard Powers, Operation Wandering Soul (1993), présente le lien subtil qui associe un mondialisme déjà usé et vieillissant à l’enfant perçu comme catégorie dominante. Comme les faces serpentines d’un ruban de Möbius lové autour de l’illimité et de l’intemporel, le texte, tendu entre ses deux infinis – l’univers et l’enfant – révise la portée, la conception, la structure et le style du genre romanesque. Délaissant Aristote pour Einstein, Operation Wandering Soul se place sur le terrain de la cosmologie. Le récit, qui rassemble la kyrielle des grands ralliements juvéniles et leurs vains pèlerinages, concentre l’espace-temps dans une présentation qui évoque la « somme des histoires » de Richard Feynman. La contraction de l’espace-temps opérée par le roman ne fait pas de celui-ci un hymne simpliste au global (catégorie déjà aussi datée que celle des malheureux vétérans du Vietnam), mais capte au contraire la conscience grandissante d’une existence sans origine qui s’étend à perte de vue au-delà de ses coordonnées supposées. Le roman s’enroule sur lui-même tout en s’épanchant au dehors, boucle ses cadres et ses détours tout en desserrant leur emprise. Il fait tourner la roue de ses récits comme des planètes en rotation, la ronde d’un système solaire, le tourbillon d’une galaxie. La conscience que présente Operation Wandering Soul ne se résume donc pas au seul point de vue de l’âme errante qu’est le personnage de Kraft, mais consiste en la somme de tous les temps et de tous les lieux, de leurs strates accumulées comme une conscience en acte, complexe et tissée de réseaux, qui n’appartient à personne et est partagée par tous. Cette accumulation organise le jeu des perspectives multiples qui instaurent l’acte de lecture et sont instaurées par lui. À cet égard, lire constitue ici une physique des oubliés.Richard Powers’ novel Operation Wandering Soul (1993) enacts the canny link between an already jaded and out-dated globalism and the child as an ascendant category. Two sides of a snaking moebius enwrapping endlessness and timelessness, the novel’s tailing infinities—the universe and the child—recalibrate the scope, conception, narrative structure, and style of the novel as a genre. Moving from the Aristotelean to the Einsteinian, Operation Wandering Soul’s terrain is cosmological, while its narrative collapses time/space into an exhibition of something like Richard Feynman’s “sum over the histories” made up of proliferating versions of juvenile massings and vain pilgrimages. The novel’s collapse of time/space is not a simplistic paean to the global (a category already as out-dated as hapless Vietnam vets), but instead bags the gathering consciousness of an originless existence forever extending beyond its supposed coordinates. The novel wraps both inward and out, framing its frames and detours while loosing them. It spins tales like a revolving planet, wheeling solar system, or careening galaxy. The consciousness enacted by Operation Wandering Soul is not defined, thus, only as the perspective of its wandering soul surgeon protagonist Kraft, but as the accruing of all time and place, layered as an enactment of a complex and networked consciousness belonging to no one and everyone. Such accrual is a multi-perspectival echoing instigated by and instigating the act of reading, where reading itself constitutes the physics of the forgotten

Narrative and Normative Disjuncture: A Queer World-Literary Reading of May-Lan Tan’s ‘Date Night’

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Wasafiri on 29 May 2019, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02690055.2019.158003

“Older-wiser-lesbians” and “baby-dykes”: mediating age and generation in New Queer Cinema

Representations of intersections of gender, age, and sexuality can reveal deep-rooted cultural anxieties about older women and sexuality. Images of lesbian ageing are of particular interest in terms of alterity, as the old/er queer woman can combine layers of otherness—not only is she the cultural “other” within heteronormativity, but she can also appear as the opposite of popular culture’s lesbian chic. In this article, a cultural analysis of a range of films—If These Walls Could Talk 2 (dir. Anderson, Coolidge, and Heche 2000), Itty Bitty Titty Committee (dir. Babbit 2007), The Owls (dir. Dunye 2010), Hannah Free (dir. Carlton 2009), and Cloudburst (dir. Fitzgerald 2011)—considers diverse dramatisations of lesbian generations. This article interrogates to what extent alternative cinemas deconstruct normative conceptualisations of ageing. Drawing on recent critiques of post-feminist culture, and a range of feminist and age/ing studies scholarship, it suggests that a linear understanding of ageing and the generational underlies dominant depictions of oppositional binaries of young versus old, of generational segregation or rivalry, and the othering of age. It concludes that non-linear understandings of temporality and ageing contain the potential for New Queer Cinema to counteract such idealisations of youthfulness, which, it argues, is one of the most deep-rooted manifestations of (hetero)normativity

The Subject of Denegation The “Speaking” Subject “I Am Not”

Samuel Beckett’s play Not I enacts the process of negation by which subjects continually produce themselve

Investigating the Special: The Symbolic Function of the Independent Counsel

Symposium on Law, Morality, and Popular Culture in the Public Sphere at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, April 6, 2001

West of Beckett

Archeologies are stories we tell about unsorted detritus abandoned midlunch. The perpetually-sorting organizational impetus, the compulsively arranging intelligence, hovers shamanistically over a scattering of cultural objets petits a, significant in their survival and recall, significant in their witness to the quotidian, significant in their connotative capacities—at least in so far as these shiny objects catalogue themselves in our consciousness. The only self-conscious archaeologist of ou..