The Mask of “Judaism”

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Reps Admin

“Judaism” as Political Concept: Toward a Critique of Political Theology

by David Nirenberg

The author begins:

“Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies bears an enigmatic subtitle: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Enigmatic because although ‘political theology’ may be an allusion to Carl Schmitt’s 1922 book by that name, the meaning of the allusion remains elusive: Kantorowicz provided no commentary. My title, too, is meant to resonate with one of Schmitt’s, in this case his Concept of the Political. I will not be cryptic about my claim, which is that key European conceptions of the political—including Carl Schmitt’s—emerged through thinking about Judaism. Here I don’t mean Judaism as a historical or lived religion, but Judaism as a figure of Christian thought, a figure produced by the efforts of generations of thinkers to make sense of the world, a figure projected into that world and constitutive of it.

“’Political theology,’ I will suggest, is a conception of the political that emerged through Christian projections of Jewish enemies. Like so many other concepts, its meanings are multiple and unstable across time, but I will use the phrase only in a very general sense common to Schmitt and Kantorowicz, as well as to many other thinkers: that of a grounding of human political action in a commandment of obedience to the sovereign authority of God. I hope to convince the reader, first, that the representation of Jewish enmity has been historically important to the theorization of Christian political theology; and second, that this importance is not primarily the product of some essential aspect of lived (not to say ‘real’) Judaism, but was rather produced by the key terms and practices of Christian thought.” Continue reading …

In this article David Nirenberg traces a long history in Christian political thought of linking politics, statecraft, and worldly authority to the broader category of carnal literalism, typed as “Jewish” by the Pauline tradition. This tradition produced a tendency to discuss political error in terms of Judaism, with the difference between mortal and eternal, private and public, tyrant and legitimate monarch, mapped onto the difference between Jew and Christian. As a result of this history, transcendence as a political ideal has often figured (and perhaps still figures?) its enemies as Jewish.

DAVID NIRENBERG is Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences, and Founding Director of the university’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. His books have focused on how Jewish, Christian, and Islamic societies have interacted with and thought about each other. These include Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996); Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013); Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern (2014); and the forthcoming Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (Spring 2015).

The Forest in the Tree

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Reps Admin

The Selbst Gewählter Plan: The Schildbach Wood Library in Eighteenth-Century Hessen-Kassel

by Alice Goff

Representations 128

“In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Carl Schildbach, an unremarkable man living in Kassel, created a remarkable object: a library consisting of 546 intricate wooden boxes of various sizes styled as books and approximating folio, octavo, and duodecimo formats. Nearly every volume was made of a different species of tree, with 120 genera and 441 species represented. The trees were gathered from the forests and estates of the landgrave, where the uneducated Schildbach lived and was employed as the caretaker of the menagerie. In 1788 Schildbach printed a pamphlet announcing his ‘Holz-Bibliothek nach selbst gewähltem Plan’ or ‘Wood Library According to Self-Determined Plan,’ which had, ‘through inexhaustible skill, practical research, and repeated revision been bought to the state of completion in which it may be found presently.’” Continue reading …

Goff’s essay looks at how Schildbach’s wood library addressed the gap between the materials of nature and the materials of nature’s explanation, which troubled efforts to know and manage the forest in this period.

ALICE GOFF is a graduate student in the history department at the University of California, Berkeley, where her research focuses on the relationships between ideas and objects in the history of museums. She is working on a dissertation about the physical interactions between people and artworks in the first public art museums in German cities from 1779–1830.

Anime and Cosmic Subjectivity

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Reps Admin

A Blue Cat on the Galactic Railroad: Anime and Cosmic Subjectivity

by Paul Roquet

Representations 128

“Looking up at the stars,” begins Roquet, “does not demand much in the way of movement: the muscles in the back of the neck contract, the head lifts. But in this simple turn from the interpersonal realm of the Earth’s surface to the expansive spread of the night sky, subjectivity undergoes a quietly radical transformation. Social identity falls away as the human body gazes into the light and darkness of its own distant past. To turn to the stars is to locate the material substrate of the self within the vast expanse of the cosmos.

“In the 1985 adaptation of Miyazawa Kenji’s classic Japanese children’s tale Night on the Galactic Railroad by anime studio Group TAC, this turn to look up at the Milky Way comes to serve as an alternate horizon of self-discovery for a young boy who feels ostracized at school and has difficulty making friends. The film experiments with the emergent anime aesthetics of limited animation, sound, and character design, reworking these styles for a larger cultural turn away from social identities toward what I will call cosmic subjectivity, a form of self-understanding drawn not through social frames, but by reflecting the self against the backdrop of the larger galaxy.”

In the 1980s, Japanese animation shifted its focus away from the social self and toward cosmic subjectivity, the framing of intensely personal emotions within the larger impersonal expanse of the universe. Roquet’s essay examines Night on the Galactic Railroad as a signal moment in this shift, as it emphasizes the interpenetration of the microcosmic and macrocosmic through a range of experiments with “limited” animation, sound design, and character design that would in turn influence the imaginary worlds of later anime.

PAUL ROQUET is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University. He is currently finishing a book on ambient media, therapy culture, and the aesthetics of atmosphere in neoliberal Japan.

Distant Reading and the Blurry Edges of Genre

Posted on November 7, 2014 by Reps Admin

Ted Underwood, contributor to Representations‘ recent special forum Search, continues his engagement with digital questions on his own blog, The Stone and the Shell, with

Distant Reading and the Blurry Edges of Genre.

Having just spent two years attempting to subdivide an entire digital library by genre, Underwood encountered some interesting problems. “In particular, the problem of ‘dividing a library by genre,’” he says, “has made me realize that literary studies is constituted by exclusions that are a bit larger and more arbitrary than I used to think.”

Underwood’s contribution to the Representations Search forum, Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago, asks what it means to say that search plays an “evidentiary role in scholarship”:

“Quantitative methods have been central to the humanities since scholars began relying on full-text search to map archives. But the intellectual implications of search technology are rendered opaque by humanists’ habit of considering algorithms as arbitrary tools. To reflect more philosophically, and creatively, on the hermeneutic options available to us, humanists may need to converse with disciplines that understand algorithms as principled epistemological theories. We need computer science, in other words, not as a source of tools but as a theoretical interlocutor.”

Full text of this article can be found here.

Hinterwaldner Essay Wins Schachterle Prize

Posted on October 27, 2014 by Reps Admin

Inge Hinterwaldner’s Parallel Lines as Tools for Making Turbulence Visible (Representations 124) has won the 2104 Schachterle Essay Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA).

“Building on actor-network theory and the history of photographic and cinematic technologies, Inge Hinterwaldner’s article is an elegant, smart, and meaningful contribution to scholarship in science and technology studies that examines the use of experimental visualization to model turbulence in air and water around 1900. The essay discusses how two physicists–Etienne-Jules Marey and Friedrich Ahlborn–contrived to make visible, to measure, and to record these phenomena.” —from the SLSA prize announcement

The Schachterle Prize is awarded annually by the SLSA in recognition of the best new essay on literature and science written in English by a nontenured scholar.

Inge Hinterwaldner’s research interests include computer-based art and architecture, image theory, model theory, and temporality in the visual arts. Her first book is entitled Das systemische Bild (The systemic image; Munich, 2010).

UNESCO and the Global Information System

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Reps Admin

UNESCO and the Book in the Developing World

by Sarah Brouillette

Brouillette’s article, in Representations 127, establishes the importance of UNESCO’s role within the global history of the book. Its focus is the research on the book in the developing world that UNESCO sponsored in the 1960s and 1970s, and how that research supported claims that government should intervene in book and media industries in order to shift the disastrous imbalance in the global media system. It shows how these claims were undermined by the interests of the developed world and sidelined by the emerging discipline of book history.

SARAH BROUILLETTE is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University. She is the author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007) and of Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, 2014).

Korea’s IMF Crisis Cinema

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Reps Admin

Neoliberal Forms: CGI, Algorithm, and Hegemony in Korea’s IMF Cinema

by Joseph Jonghyun Jeon

“For anthropologists Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, a compensatory virtue of the 2008 global credit crisis was the extent to which it made visible the otherwise unseen flows of contemporary finance, specifically the rapid emergence of derivatives trading. Trading in derivatives, once a much smaller-scale mechanism for hedging in a production-based economy, was by the early 2000s a primary mode of accumulation in a global environment thoroughly committed to circulatory capital. In 2004 LiPuma and Lee had expressed frustration: ‘How does one know about, or demonstrate against, an unlisted, virtual, offshore corporation that operates in an unregulated electronic space using a secret proprietary trading strategy to buy and sell arcane financial instruments?’ But by 2012, the fog apparently had lifted, the crisis having ‘laid bare the underlying and underappreciated foundations of the financial field.’ An important part of curing the ills of contemporary finance, it seems, perhaps more fundamental than its enormous scale and power, is seeing them at all. At stake is the invisibility of digital apparatuses that constitute networked transactional spaces, calculate financial instruments using complex differential equations, and even enumerate capital itself, which are so central to this modality of circulation that it becomes difficult to separate medium from message.” (Continue reading…)

In this essay Joseph Jeon examines the co-implications of CGI filmmaking, US hegemony, and neoliberal financialization as manifested in Korea’s “IMF crisis cinema.” These films are populated by what he terms neoliberal forms that epitomize the effort in this cinema to reflect on the innate proximity of popular filmmaking to finance, and specifically on the proximity between its own material apparatus and the economic apparatus that the IMF crisis inserted into the center of Korean public discourse.

This essay is from Representations‘ current special issue Financialization and the Culture Industry. The introduction to the issue by C. D. Blanton, Colleen Lye, and Kent Puckett, is available online free of charge.

The Cinema of Apprehension

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Reps Admin

The Security Aesthetic in Bollywood’s High-Rise Horror

by Bishnupriya Ghosh

In this new essay Bishnupriya Ghosh theorizes a constellation of “high-rise horror” films from contemporary Bollywood as a cinema of apprehension. Ghosh elaborates an emergent “techno-aesthetic of security” that plunges spectators into an immersive experience of horror, orienting them to the violence of acute dispossession (of lands and livelihoods) catalyzed by current speculative financial globalization.

BISHNUPRIYA GHOSH teaches postcolonial theory, literature, and global media studies in the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently working on two monographs on speculative knowledge and globalization: The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization and The Virus Touch: Living with Epidemics.

An Idea Proper to Poetry

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Reps Admin

Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics

by Joshua Clover

The epistemological rupture proffered by finance in the seventies, seeming to inaugurate a distinct mode of production, is merely a form of appearance that capital’s struggle takes in crisis, beneath which the capitalist economy remains under the sway of the law of value and its source in socially necessary labor time. While narrative fiction has been taken insistently as the relevant literary mode or genre for understanding the motion and particularly the temporality of finance, poetry finally provides a better heuristic for such an understanding and, more substantially, for grasping the motion and dynamic of value moving behind the seeming of finance’s hegemony.

Joshua Clover’s present work revolves around political economy and forms of revolutionary struggle, including the co-authored “Can Dialectics Break BRICS?” (an assessment of class composition and communist party possibilities in emerging economies, with Aaron Benanav) forthcoming in South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Little Book of Riot, forthcoming from UC Press. He is a professor at the University of California, Davis; in 2015, he will convene a Residential Research Group at the UC Humanities Research Institute, studying “Culture, Industry, Finance.”

Photo: C. Dingler

Game of Derivatives

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Reps Admin

HBO’s Flexible Gold

by Michael Szalay

Recent HBO dramas like Game of Thrones, Luck, and The Newsroom do more than generate HBO brand equity—they quantify that equity and determine the conditions under which it might be converted into other kinds of Time Warner equity. These incipiently financial dramas are futures markets that establish rates of conversion between heterogeneous equities and should be understood as functionally equivalent to the class of financial instruments known as derivatives.

“HBO’s Flexible Gold” is from Representations‘ current special issue Financialization and the Culture Industry. The introduction to the issue by C. D. Blanton, Colleen Lye, and Kent Puckett, is available online free of charge.