Theory Aside - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822356813 ISBN 13: 9780822356813

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Where can theory go now? Where other voices concern themselves with theory's life or death, the contributors to Theory Aside take up another possibility: that our theoretical prospects are better served worrying less about "what’s next?" and more about "what else?" Instead of looking for the next big thing, the fourteen prominent thinkers in this volume take up lines of thought lost or overlooked during theory's canonization. They demonstrate that intellectual progress need not depend on the discovery of a new theorist or theory. Moving subtly through a diverse range of thinkers and topics—aesthetics, affect, animation and film studies, bibliography, cognitive science, globalization, phenomenology, poetics, political and postcolonial theory, race and identity, queer theory, and sociological reading practices—the contributors show that a more sustained, less apocalyptic attention to ideas might lead to a richer discussion of our intellectual landscapes and the place of the humanities and social sciences in it. In their turn away from the radically new, these essays reveal that what’s fallen aside still surprises.

Contributors. Ian Balfour, Karen Beckman, Pheng Cheah, Frances Ferguson, William Flesch, Anne-Lise François, Mark B. N. Hansen, Simon Jarvis, Heather Love, Natalie Melas, Jason Potts, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jordan Alexander Stein, Daniel Stout, Irene Tucker

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jason Potts and Daniel Stout, eds.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Theory Aside

By Jason Potts, Daniel Stout

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5681-3

Contents

INTRODUCTION - On the Side: Allocations of Attention in the Theoretical Moment | Jason Potts and Daniel Stout, 
PART I Chronologies Aside, 
1. Writing the History of Homophobia | Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 
2. Late Exercises in Minimal Affirmatives | Anne-Lise François, 
3. Comparative Noncontemporaneities: C. L. R. James and Ernst Bloch | Natalie Melas, 
4. On Suicide, and Other Forms of Social Extinguishment | Elizabeth A. Povinelli, 
PART II Approaches Aside, 
5. What Is Historical Poetics? | Simon Jarvis, 
6. The Biopolitics of Recognition: Making Female Subjects of Globalization | Pheng Cheah, 
7. Before Racial Construction | Irene Tucker, 
8. Archive Favor: African American Literature before and after Theory | Jordan Alexander Stein, 
9. What Cinema Wasn't: Animating Film Theory's Double Blind Spot | Karen Beckman, 
PART III Figures Aside, 
10. Hyperbolic Discounting and Intertemporal Bargaining | William Flesch, 
11. The Primacy of Sensation: Psychophysics, Phenomenology, Whitehead | Mark B. N. Hansen, 
12. Reading the Social: Erving Goffman and Sexuality Studies | Heather Love, 
13. Our I. A. Richards Moment: The Machine and Its Adjustments | Frances Ferguson, 
14. Needing to Know (:) Theory / Afterwords | Ian Balfour, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
CONTRIBUTORS, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Writing the History of Homophobia

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

I'd like to begin with a story that has no homosexual content at all. A few weeks ago I was reading Proust—which is pretty much a chronic condition with me—and I got to a particular volume where the narrative about French turn-of-the-century high society happens to be structured around the Dreyfus case. Now, all I really knew about the Dreyfus case was extremely general: I knew it was a political explosion that made Watergate look like a quilting bee and that for about half a decade, as a result of it, the issue of anti-Semitism was the issue, in some respects the most bitter issue ever in French politics and public life. But I decided that it would be worth learning a little more, so I got up and headed for the bookcase and looked up Dreyfus in my 1945 Encyclopedia Britannica—and sure enough, there he was, with several pages explaining all the details of the case, all the historical background, all the evidence forged and authentic, all the dramatis personae, all the legal technicalities of his various appeals, all the consequences for the rise and fall of governments. There was only one thing that wasn't mentioned in the Britannica article, and that was the small matter that Dreyfus was Jewish and that this probably had some effect on his fate and the importance of his case.

I still don't know what to make of this. It isn't as though the Britannica exactly suppresses the Jewish dimension of the Dreyfus case: when you look up "anti-Semitism," you find pages about the importance of the Dreyfus case in crystallizing nineteenth-century attitudes toward Jews. But you have to know enough to look up "anti-Semitism"; that is to say, you can learn what's most important about Dreyfus from the Britannica, but first you have to know something about Dreyfus that you can't learn by looking up "Dreyfus" in the Britannica. The information's there, in a sense, but it's compartmentalized in such a way that you have to already know it in order to learn it.

Okay, here's a more obviously relevant story. Imagine that you're a kid of fourteen or fifteen, you read around a lot, and you've come across a reference somewhere that convinces you that there was some kind of interesting mystery about someone named Oscar Wilde. So, of course, you head for your trusty old Britannica. And sure enough, you learn there was a scandal about Wilde. The Britannica says, "His success as a dramatist had by [1894] gone some way to disabuse hostile critics of the suspicions as regards his personal character which had been excited by the apparent looseness of morals which since his Oxford days it had always pleased him to affect; but to the consternation of his friends, who had ceased to credit the existence of any real moral obliquity, in 1895 came fatal revelations as the result of his bringing a libel action against the Marquis of Queensberry; and at the Old Bailey, in May, Wilde was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour for offenses under the Criminal Law Amendment Act."

Huh? What did Wilde do, you ask your fourteen-year-old self. "Looseness of morals," "moral obliquity," "fatal revelations," "offenses under the Criminal Law Amendment Act": if you already know that Wilde's crime was to be gay, then you'll know from these phrases that Wilde's crime was to be gay. If you don't already know it, you certainly aren't going to learn it here. What do you need to look under to learn the truth? Well, I haven't figured that out yet. You might, supposing you already know enough to, look under "homosexuality." But there is no entry for homosexuality. "Homophobia," which was the real reason Wilde went to prison? Don't be silly—there's nothing under "homophobia." Shall we try "lesbian"? No entry for "lesbian." Sex? You can look up sex, but all you'll find is "sexual reproduction," which doesn't include nonreproductive sex and which, in any case, seems, rather remarkably, to be practiced only among the lower animals.

On the other hand, we know that the Britannica has not made a systematic policy decision that the word homosexuality will never darken its pages. It so happens that if you look up Proust himself, for instance, you learn that homosexuality is one of his characteristic subjects. And, supposing that the treatment of Dreyfus is at all analogous (which it may or may not be), it is altogether possible that somewhere else in Britannica, if only you could hit on the exactly right word to look it up under, pages and pages of state-of-the-art information (circa 1933) on homosexuality and homophobia are just waiting to reveal themselves to you. But where?

I mention the Britannica problem, first because it's an excellent example of the practical difficulties of learning anything about sexual mores from any historical distance—and here the distance is only forty years! But the second reason I mention it is as an emblem of the extremely elusive and maddeningly plural ways in which cultures and their various institutions efface and alter sexual meaning. The Britannica —which, after all, is only a single institution, although a large and complicated one—does not have a single strategy for dealing with the subject of homosexuality; its tactics range from apparent candor (in the case of Proust's work), to opaque technicalities ("offense under the Criminal Law Amendment Act"), to euphemism ("suspicions as to his personal character"), to overt condemnation ("moral obliquity"), to a general reluctance to raise the issue where not absolutely forced to (see, for instance, on Whitman), to the blanket denial (see the missing article on "homosexuality"—if you can find it). As with the Dreyfus case too, the even more misleading techniques of displacement, compartmentalization, and false categorization are common in discourse about homosexuality.

The consequences of all this are in a certain sense very simple. The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822356813
• ISBN 13: 9780822356813
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Herausgeber: Potts
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland