This essay, Grid Locks: The Social Life of Abstraction, from Agnes Martin to Mark Bradford, is ba... more This essay, Grid Locks: The Social Life of Abstraction, from Agnes Martin to Mark Bradford, is based on a painting by Los Angeles based Black artist Mark Bradford, On a Clear Day, I Can Usually See All the Way to Watts (2001), that was exhibited at SFMOMA in an installation that juxtaposed it to an untitled series of drawings by abstract artist Agnes Martin, On a Clear Day (2019-2020). In an extended reading of abstraction and its social implications and of Bradford’s engagement with abstract traditions, the essay explores the material traces of impurity in his contemporary non-representative visual art. In particular it focuses on hair as complex sign of impurity, concealment, animality, decay, aesthetic beauty, etc, and of the ways in which its incorporation, materially and metonymically, in the painting disturbs the clarity of the white aesthetic gaze. The essay thus considers how the material practices of certain broadly speaking postcolonial artists, but in particular the Black Abstraction exemplified by Bradford’s work, challenge the Kantian aesthetic tradition that has dominated the visual arts even in a post-Kantian artistic realm.
This essay discusses a remark on the eye and the mouth in Bersani and Dutoit’s Caravaggio’s Secre... more This essay discusses a remark on the eye and the mouth in Bersani and Dutoit’s Caravaggio’s Secrets that links Caravaggio to Samuel Beckett. Exploring the idea of the gaze and the voice as “things” rather than objects that confirm the subject in its place, and connecting Bersani’s understanding of the thing as escaping the subject-object relation in Beckett to Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a, the essay posits this understanding of the thing as the basis of Bersani’s interest in the possibility of a nonrelational sociality.
In December 2013, the American Studies Association passed a resolution to endorse and honor the b... more In December 2013, the American Studies Association passed a resolution to endorse and honor the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Votes that endorse the boycott have greater implications for the liberation Palestinian people, but for others the votes were viewed as an attack on academic freedom of Israelis. On Wednesday December 18th, 2013 Karma Chavez, host of A Public Affair on Madison, WI station WORT, discussed the boycott with a member of U.S. campaign’s organizing collective, Professor David Lloyd. Chavez and Lloyd analyzed the complex and complicated questions that surround the BDS movement and well as the implications for the region as a whole.
This essay addresses Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to draw out the implications of the... more This essay addresses Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to draw out the implications of the paradox that he notes, that an exercise of a right, if it calls in question the legitimacy of the legal order, can be perceived by the state as violent, even where it is, strictly speaking, non-violent. Benjamin theorized this in relation to the general strike, which reveals “an objective contradiction in the legal situation” that is nonetheless fundamental to the problematic constitution-in-violence of the state itself. His meditation on the strike can be extended to boycott, divestment and sanctions as non-violent exercises of a right that are understood by the state as destructive acts of violence: they present a challenge to the legitimacy of the state precisely in their will to abolish a condition of exclusion and differential rights that is constitutive of the state. In this respect, the observation that BDS seeks “the destruction of the state of Israel” finds its rationale and its limit within the logic of the “Critique of Violence” but also points beyond the institutions of rights, states and law.
This essay is intended as a thinking-in-conversation with the black radical tradition and with th... more This essay is intended as a thinking-in-conversation with the black radical tradition and with the question of “thingliness” that emerges in the work of Fred Moten and Denise da Silva in particular. It hopes to extend my recent book Under Representation’s arguments regarding the Subaltern and early reflections on painting, theatre and the thing that I did in a previous book, Beckett’s Thing. It works through the opening chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, "On Sense Certainty”, in order to recuperate from his characterization of the pre-objectival thing something that might be called a resistant “social life of things”, to borrow a phrase from Moten. Hegel’s subsumption of the thing into self-conscious perception appears rather as a form of appropriation through representation. The essay ends with a reading of a passage in Toni Cade Bambara’s short story, “Broken Field Running”, that seems to exemplify the thinking as well as the dialogical form of this “social life of things.” Kerstin Stakemeier's response, "An Unromantic Art", follows.
"Textes pour rien/Texts for Nothing de Samuel Beckett: Le corps de la voix impossible", La Revue des lettres modernes, 2018
This essay examines the place of Avigdor Arikha’s drawings for Beckett’s Textes pour rien in the ... more This essay examines the place of Avigdor Arikha’s drawings for Beckett’s Textes pour rien in the trajectory of the artist’s work in comparison with the transitional role played by the Textes in Beckett’s own oeuvre. Much as Beckett’s Textes mark the exhaustion of a mode of writing practiced through the Trilogy, Arikha’s drawings anticipate his own abandonment of abstraction and turn to drawing from life in ways that, like Beckett, begin to question the terms of the image and representation.
This essay draws out some largely unremarked aesthetic convergences between Samuel Beckett and tw... more This essay draws out some largely unremarked aesthetic convergences between Samuel Beckett and two Romanian-Jewish, German-language contemporaries of his: the poet Paul Celan and the painter Avigdor Arikha.
Résumé Cet essai met en relief quelques points de confluence esthétique peu remarqués entre Samuel Beckett et deux de ses contemporains juif-roumains d' expression allemande, le poète Paul Celan et le peintre Avigdor Arikha.
This essay discusses the three poems that Yeats titled with dates, 'September 1913', 'Easter 1916... more This essay discusses the three poems that Yeats titled with dates, 'September 1913', 'Easter 1916', and 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen', in the context of ongoing centenary commemorations of the period of Irish decolonization. It does so by juxtaposing the historical function of dating and commemorating with the virtual possibility of encounters that never quite happened, establishing a trajectory through Yeats's poems that runs from James Connolly's not meeting Rosa Luxemburg to Paul Celan's commemoration of her murder in the 1919 Spartacist uprising in a poem from the late volume Schneepart. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's reading of Celan and the date, the essay uses this constellation of possibilities to reflect on the stakes of a commemoration that entertains possibility rather than closing off the past. The theme of this issue of Modernist Cultures, with its focus on Ireland and the First World War, intersects with a period in Irish history that contains and embraces that war and was decisive for the course of Irish decolonization. It is a decade whose intense political, military and cultural activity is shorthanded by certain dates, dates which lend themselves to a commemoration that can function either to open or to close off historical process. It is important, however, to inquire into the intent and the tendency of commemoration, asking both what drives commemoration and in what direction it tends as an act of histori-cisation as well as one of remembrance. Self-evidently, the period of Modernist Cultures 13.3 (2018): 445–464
Nasser Hussain often attended to the relation between law and poetry and this article begins with... more Nasser Hussain often attended to the relation between law and poetry and this article begins with a reading of his brief paper " Auden's Law like Love. " In a famous essay, " Nomos and Narrative, " Robert Cover linked the communication and the application of legal norms to narrative. This article presents an alternative, anti-normative, and anti-narrative, notion of the relation between poetry and justice that one might call " a-nomos and lyric. " It argues that an alternative conception of " poetic justice " persists in the fundamental, paradoxical sociality of a poetic language that resists consumption and subsumption as it does coercion. In its very redundancy, in both the semantic and economic senses of the word, poetry renders to us an apprehension of what " justice " might be as opposed to law. Where law determines, decides, and pronounces sentence, justice opens the space of attentiveness that necessarily suspends the decision of the law. This idea of poetry unties the knotting of nomos to narrative as it stages the indeterminacy of the sentence and of the bounds of experience. Through its redundancy, condensation and proliferation of meaning through tropes, and its delay of the arrival of sense, poetry offers a different understanding of the relation of law and literature than arguments based on narrative can attain. It offers a model of justice beyond the law.
“The delinking of the political from the economic and the production of economic centres and depe... more “The delinking of the political from the economic and the production of economic centres and dependent peripheries in Europe is not a new phenomenon; Lloyd argues that what is new is the legitimisation and normalisation of these structural divisions followed by new racist discourses applicable now to the level of the nation-state and its subjects. By tracing the metonymies of PIGS, the acronym for Portugal, Ireland/Italy, Greece and Spain, Lloyd shows how this name has not only signified the natural baseness of these countries failing to meet the economic criteria of the rich North; it has also conjured a long history of race thought in Europe rooted in a certain idea of Man, the “overrepresented European Man” (Wynter 260) that both Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter have decried in their works, that has been the source of “neo-racism” (Balibar 20-21). The subjects not made to his measure and their organised polities that fall short of the proper Europe only certain European nation-states ideally imitate are the beasts, the rogues, or the abnormals that should be cured, policed or ordered by sovereignty. The archipelagoes of Greece and Ireland are for Lloyd sites of transformative politics rather than rogue peripheries; they call to forms of solidarity that “exceed the centripetal logic of austerity.” The response of small islands in the European periphery like Lesvos exemplifies this transformative politics that deluges the centre of economic austerity with acts of humanitarian aid that secure a polity to come; a polity whose centre is the human, not man, and whose offering is the social and political potentiality of the constituencies and their collectivities who survive not to barely live but with a profoundly human task at hand, to have a political life, a bios politikos, to live well.” From Mina Karavanta, From "Introduction: In the Wake of the Polity to Come", Synthesis 9 [2017]: http://synthesis.enl.uoa.gr/living-through-the-interregnum-9-2016.html
This essay examines the work and legacy of Ernie O'Malley, IRA organizer during the Irish war of ... more This essay examines the work and legacy of Ernie O'Malley, IRA organizer during the Irish war of decolonization and civil war, 1919-24, who later wrote two important autobiographical works reflecting on his experiences in these wars. The essay argues that O'Malley's recently collected papers show that far from being backward-looking and conservative, Irish republicanism was intellectually and aesthetically attuned to European modernism and can be seen as a significant precursor of tendencies in later movements for decolonization internationally. It is through that double lens, of modernism and anti-colonialism, that O'Malley's work must be understood.
In June, 2016 a group of six MLA members traveled together to the West Bank and Israel to find ou... more In June, 2016 a group of six MLA members traveled together to the West Bank and Israel to find out what it was like for Palestinian academics and students trying to study, teach, and research at universities in the occupied territories and within Israel itself. In addition to learning about academic conditions under occupation, the group also wanted to hear directly from Palestinian scholars and students about their thoughts on the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. They also met with a number of Jewish Israeli leftwing academics and activists to hear about the opportunities for change from within the regime. In the course of their eight day trip the group met with undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and university administrators at six universities in the occupied West Bank — Birzeit University in Ramallah, Bethlehem University, An-Najah University in Nablus, Palestinian Technical University–Kadoorie in Tulkarm, and Hebron University – as well as both Palestinian and Jewish academics and students from a number of Israeli universities. The report includes a detailed account of how Palestinian education has been undermined by Israeli checkpoints, impediments to travel, obstacles to getting materials, raids on campuses, arrests, denial of entry to foreign faculty, and restrictions on research. It also addresses the complicity of Israeli academic institutions in the occupation and the unequal treatment of Palestinian faculty and students in Israel. The report presents the positions of Palestinians and Israelis on the academic movement, making a convincing case for an MLA resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The report is also available here: https://mlaboycott.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/report-on-mla-members-trip-to-the-west-bank-and-israel/
This essay seeks to connect the insistence on performance in Yeats’s poetry of the 1920s to the p... more This essay seeks to connect the insistence on performance in Yeats’s poetry of the 1920s to the performativity of violence in the foundation of the state. Yeats’s emphasis on the performative or declarative utterance, which he links explicitly to acts of founding violence, and the pattern by which throughout the later poetry, performance of the poems enforces decisions on certain cruxes of meaning, connects his poetic mode to the problem of founding political violence in the Irish war of decolonization and the subsequent civil war. But it also links Yeats’s authoritarian political leanings, and in particular his consistent emphasis on the relation between taking life and the legitimacy of the state, to his German contemporaries, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. The correlation between Yeats’s political thinking and,the poetry together with his intellectual affinities with European understandings of political violence, suggest that far from aberrantly flirting with fascism, shows a deep understanding of its implications for the idea of the liberal and the postcolonial state.
This past December, a conference was held in Ramallah, entitled: “Walter Benjamin in Palestine: O... more This past December, a conference was held in Ramallah, entitled: “Walter Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought”. David Lloyd reports here on that conference, which was organized to honor the Palestinian call to boycott Israeli academic institutions and as an alternative to a Benjamin conference being held in the same month, in flagrant violation of that call, at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. But the conference far exceeded that initial rationale: “As the BDS movement continues to advance, perhaps workshops like these, which step beyond mere “severance of relations” (as Benjamin described the act of striking) to shape conditions for new modes of relation, may offer a way to think the future of our resistance to Israeli apartheid. Perhaps too it offers a model also for an alternative to the insidious corporatization of our intellectual and creative lives under the neoliberal dispensation we all confront, wherever we reside, and not only in occupied Palestine.”
This paper seeks to examine the history and practices of incarceration as a mechanism of the libe... more This paper seeks to examine the history and practices of incarceration as a mechanism of the liberal state in relation to a contested and colonial domain, namely, Ireland. Commencing with the period of the formation of the modern British state and the relation between prison reform and political prisoners’ protest, I turn to look at the simultaneity of a discourse on prison architectures and on [the welfare of] prisoner’s bodies. The long-standing concern of the state with the structures of incarceration and punishment, on the one hand, and with the welfare of the “reformable” subject on the other provides a context for the prison protests of the 1970s and 1980s in Northern Ireland, of the bureaucratic opposition between the “ordinary decent criminal” [ODC] and the recalcitrant political prisoner, of the nature of a protest that deploys both the reduced “bare life” of the body and the very architecture of the prison against the logic of “criminalization” of political prisoners.
To date, apparently, no major Western women’s or feminist organization has declared its solidarit... more To date, apparently, no major Western women’s or feminist organization has declared its solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. This introduction argues that the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation and for rights, justice and equality is a fundamentally feminist issue. It is so both on the grounds of the traditions of international solidarity that have been central to feminisms that are also anti-racist and anti-imperialist and because Israel’s occupation and legalized system of discrimination targets the reproduction of Palestinian life in the fullest sense, not only as biological life but also in the larger sense of the social and cultural. The paper concludes by arguing that the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel is a crucial intervention which, in consistency with feminist theory and practice, feminists internationally should endorse and act upon.
Discourse on Israel, both propagandistic and analytical, has the peculiar tendency of representin... more Discourse on Israel, both propagandistic and analytical, has the peculiar tendency of representing it at one moment as normal – a normal democracy, a normal Western society, a normal state – and at others as exceptional: a democracy uniquely embattled among hostile neighbors, a secular state that historically fulfills the religious destiny of a people, a democracy that defines itself as a state for a single people and religion, the only democracy in the region, and so forth. At times, defenders of Israel lay claim to its normality as the reason to exempt it from the norms of human rights and international law, at others complain that Israel is being ‘singled out’ for criticism. This paper argues that these apparent contradictions, over and above their value to public relations opportunism, can best be explained by understanding Israel’s occupation of Palestine as an exemplary settler colonial project whose contradictions are embedded in the early framing of Zionism and whose unfolding follows a logic long ago analyzed by Albert Memmi and other theorists of settler colonialism.
It is often assumed that while both capitalism and the modern state may originate in processes su... more It is often assumed that while both capitalism and the modern state may originate in processes such as primitive accumulation, imperialism and colonialism, and conquest, modernization in both the political and economic spheres gradually leaves those stages behind, allowing for some form of cosmopolitan transnational globality to emerge. In particular, settler colonialism and primitive accumulation have been understood to belong to early stages of capital expansion and accordingly to be formations lodged in the past. This introduction argues that the ongoing history of settler colonialism forms a crucial terrain through which to understand military occupation and the formations and practices of the neoliberal state that has emerged to regulate and promote a new regime of accumulation. It also explores the ways in which the formations of the contemporary state, whether military, economic, political, legal or cultural, may remain grounded in apparently peripheral or outmoded modes of domination. Understanding the neoliberal regime of accumulation in terms of its continuing debt to such histories will have a crucial bearing on the organization and articulation of resistance and dissent in the present.
This essay, Grid Locks: The Social Life of Abstraction, from Agnes Martin to Mark Bradford, is ba... more This essay, Grid Locks: The Social Life of Abstraction, from Agnes Martin to Mark Bradford, is based on a painting by Los Angeles based Black artist Mark Bradford, On a Clear Day, I Can Usually See All the Way to Watts (2001), that was exhibited at SFMOMA in an installation that juxtaposed it to an untitled series of drawings by abstract artist Agnes Martin, On a Clear Day (2019-2020). In an extended reading of abstraction and its social implications and of Bradford’s engagement with abstract traditions, the essay explores the material traces of impurity in his contemporary non-representative visual art. In particular it focuses on hair as complex sign of impurity, concealment, animality, decay, aesthetic beauty, etc, and of the ways in which its incorporation, materially and metonymically, in the painting disturbs the clarity of the white aesthetic gaze. The essay thus considers how the material practices of certain broadly speaking postcolonial artists, but in particular the Black Abstraction exemplified by Bradford’s work, challenge the Kantian aesthetic tradition that has dominated the visual arts even in a post-Kantian artistic realm.
This essay discusses a remark on the eye and the mouth in Bersani and Dutoit’s Caravaggio’s Secre... more This essay discusses a remark on the eye and the mouth in Bersani and Dutoit’s Caravaggio’s Secrets that links Caravaggio to Samuel Beckett. Exploring the idea of the gaze and the voice as “things” rather than objects that confirm the subject in its place, and connecting Bersani’s understanding of the thing as escaping the subject-object relation in Beckett to Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a, the essay posits this understanding of the thing as the basis of Bersani’s interest in the possibility of a nonrelational sociality.
In December 2013, the American Studies Association passed a resolution to endorse and honor the b... more In December 2013, the American Studies Association passed a resolution to endorse and honor the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Votes that endorse the boycott have greater implications for the liberation Palestinian people, but for others the votes were viewed as an attack on academic freedom of Israelis. On Wednesday December 18th, 2013 Karma Chavez, host of A Public Affair on Madison, WI station WORT, discussed the boycott with a member of U.S. campaign’s organizing collective, Professor David Lloyd. Chavez and Lloyd analyzed the complex and complicated questions that surround the BDS movement and well as the implications for the region as a whole.
This essay addresses Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to draw out the implications of the... more This essay addresses Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to draw out the implications of the paradox that he notes, that an exercise of a right, if it calls in question the legitimacy of the legal order, can be perceived by the state as violent, even where it is, strictly speaking, non-violent. Benjamin theorized this in relation to the general strike, which reveals “an objective contradiction in the legal situation” that is nonetheless fundamental to the problematic constitution-in-violence of the state itself. His meditation on the strike can be extended to boycott, divestment and sanctions as non-violent exercises of a right that are understood by the state as destructive acts of violence: they present a challenge to the legitimacy of the state precisely in their will to abolish a condition of exclusion and differential rights that is constitutive of the state. In this respect, the observation that BDS seeks “the destruction of the state of Israel” finds its rationale and its limit within the logic of the “Critique of Violence” but also points beyond the institutions of rights, states and law.
This essay is intended as a thinking-in-conversation with the black radical tradition and with th... more This essay is intended as a thinking-in-conversation with the black radical tradition and with the question of “thingliness” that emerges in the work of Fred Moten and Denise da Silva in particular. It hopes to extend my recent book Under Representation’s arguments regarding the Subaltern and early reflections on painting, theatre and the thing that I did in a previous book, Beckett’s Thing. It works through the opening chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, "On Sense Certainty”, in order to recuperate from his characterization of the pre-objectival thing something that might be called a resistant “social life of things”, to borrow a phrase from Moten. Hegel’s subsumption of the thing into self-conscious perception appears rather as a form of appropriation through representation. The essay ends with a reading of a passage in Toni Cade Bambara’s short story, “Broken Field Running”, that seems to exemplify the thinking as well as the dialogical form of this “social life of things.” Kerstin Stakemeier's response, "An Unromantic Art", follows.
"Textes pour rien/Texts for Nothing de Samuel Beckett: Le corps de la voix impossible", La Revue des lettres modernes, 2018
This essay examines the place of Avigdor Arikha’s drawings for Beckett’s Textes pour rien in the ... more This essay examines the place of Avigdor Arikha’s drawings for Beckett’s Textes pour rien in the trajectory of the artist’s work in comparison with the transitional role played by the Textes in Beckett’s own oeuvre. Much as Beckett’s Textes mark the exhaustion of a mode of writing practiced through the Trilogy, Arikha’s drawings anticipate his own abandonment of abstraction and turn to drawing from life in ways that, like Beckett, begin to question the terms of the image and representation.
This essay draws out some largely unremarked aesthetic convergences between Samuel Beckett and tw... more This essay draws out some largely unremarked aesthetic convergences between Samuel Beckett and two Romanian-Jewish, German-language contemporaries of his: the poet Paul Celan and the painter Avigdor Arikha.
Résumé Cet essai met en relief quelques points de confluence esthétique peu remarqués entre Samuel Beckett et deux de ses contemporains juif-roumains d' expression allemande, le poète Paul Celan et le peintre Avigdor Arikha.
This essay discusses the three poems that Yeats titled with dates, 'September 1913', 'Easter 1916... more This essay discusses the three poems that Yeats titled with dates, 'September 1913', 'Easter 1916', and 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen', in the context of ongoing centenary commemorations of the period of Irish decolonization. It does so by juxtaposing the historical function of dating and commemorating with the virtual possibility of encounters that never quite happened, establishing a trajectory through Yeats's poems that runs from James Connolly's not meeting Rosa Luxemburg to Paul Celan's commemoration of her murder in the 1919 Spartacist uprising in a poem from the late volume Schneepart. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's reading of Celan and the date, the essay uses this constellation of possibilities to reflect on the stakes of a commemoration that entertains possibility rather than closing off the past. The theme of this issue of Modernist Cultures, with its focus on Ireland and the First World War, intersects with a period in Irish history that contains and embraces that war and was decisive for the course of Irish decolonization. It is a decade whose intense political, military and cultural activity is shorthanded by certain dates, dates which lend themselves to a commemoration that can function either to open or to close off historical process. It is important, however, to inquire into the intent and the tendency of commemoration, asking both what drives commemoration and in what direction it tends as an act of histori-cisation as well as one of remembrance. Self-evidently, the period of Modernist Cultures 13.3 (2018): 445–464
Nasser Hussain often attended to the relation between law and poetry and this article begins with... more Nasser Hussain often attended to the relation between law and poetry and this article begins with a reading of his brief paper " Auden's Law like Love. " In a famous essay, " Nomos and Narrative, " Robert Cover linked the communication and the application of legal norms to narrative. This article presents an alternative, anti-normative, and anti-narrative, notion of the relation between poetry and justice that one might call " a-nomos and lyric. " It argues that an alternative conception of " poetic justice " persists in the fundamental, paradoxical sociality of a poetic language that resists consumption and subsumption as it does coercion. In its very redundancy, in both the semantic and economic senses of the word, poetry renders to us an apprehension of what " justice " might be as opposed to law. Where law determines, decides, and pronounces sentence, justice opens the space of attentiveness that necessarily suspends the decision of the law. This idea of poetry unties the knotting of nomos to narrative as it stages the indeterminacy of the sentence and of the bounds of experience. Through its redundancy, condensation and proliferation of meaning through tropes, and its delay of the arrival of sense, poetry offers a different understanding of the relation of law and literature than arguments based on narrative can attain. It offers a model of justice beyond the law.
“The delinking of the political from the economic and the production of economic centres and depe... more “The delinking of the political from the economic and the production of economic centres and dependent peripheries in Europe is not a new phenomenon; Lloyd argues that what is new is the legitimisation and normalisation of these structural divisions followed by new racist discourses applicable now to the level of the nation-state and its subjects. By tracing the metonymies of PIGS, the acronym for Portugal, Ireland/Italy, Greece and Spain, Lloyd shows how this name has not only signified the natural baseness of these countries failing to meet the economic criteria of the rich North; it has also conjured a long history of race thought in Europe rooted in a certain idea of Man, the “overrepresented European Man” (Wynter 260) that both Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter have decried in their works, that has been the source of “neo-racism” (Balibar 20-21). The subjects not made to his measure and their organised polities that fall short of the proper Europe only certain European nation-states ideally imitate are the beasts, the rogues, or the abnormals that should be cured, policed or ordered by sovereignty. The archipelagoes of Greece and Ireland are for Lloyd sites of transformative politics rather than rogue peripheries; they call to forms of solidarity that “exceed the centripetal logic of austerity.” The response of small islands in the European periphery like Lesvos exemplifies this transformative politics that deluges the centre of economic austerity with acts of humanitarian aid that secure a polity to come; a polity whose centre is the human, not man, and whose offering is the social and political potentiality of the constituencies and their collectivities who survive not to barely live but with a profoundly human task at hand, to have a political life, a bios politikos, to live well.” From Mina Karavanta, From "Introduction: In the Wake of the Polity to Come", Synthesis 9 [2017]: http://synthesis.enl.uoa.gr/living-through-the-interregnum-9-2016.html
This essay examines the work and legacy of Ernie O'Malley, IRA organizer during the Irish war of ... more This essay examines the work and legacy of Ernie O'Malley, IRA organizer during the Irish war of decolonization and civil war, 1919-24, who later wrote two important autobiographical works reflecting on his experiences in these wars. The essay argues that O'Malley's recently collected papers show that far from being backward-looking and conservative, Irish republicanism was intellectually and aesthetically attuned to European modernism and can be seen as a significant precursor of tendencies in later movements for decolonization internationally. It is through that double lens, of modernism and anti-colonialism, that O'Malley's work must be understood.
In June, 2016 a group of six MLA members traveled together to the West Bank and Israel to find ou... more In June, 2016 a group of six MLA members traveled together to the West Bank and Israel to find out what it was like for Palestinian academics and students trying to study, teach, and research at universities in the occupied territories and within Israel itself. In addition to learning about academic conditions under occupation, the group also wanted to hear directly from Palestinian scholars and students about their thoughts on the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. They also met with a number of Jewish Israeli leftwing academics and activists to hear about the opportunities for change from within the regime. In the course of their eight day trip the group met with undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and university administrators at six universities in the occupied West Bank — Birzeit University in Ramallah, Bethlehem University, An-Najah University in Nablus, Palestinian Technical University–Kadoorie in Tulkarm, and Hebron University – as well as both Palestinian and Jewish academics and students from a number of Israeli universities. The report includes a detailed account of how Palestinian education has been undermined by Israeli checkpoints, impediments to travel, obstacles to getting materials, raids on campuses, arrests, denial of entry to foreign faculty, and restrictions on research. It also addresses the complicity of Israeli academic institutions in the occupation and the unequal treatment of Palestinian faculty and students in Israel. The report presents the positions of Palestinians and Israelis on the academic movement, making a convincing case for an MLA resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The report is also available here: https://mlaboycott.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/report-on-mla-members-trip-to-the-west-bank-and-israel/
This essay seeks to connect the insistence on performance in Yeats’s poetry of the 1920s to the p... more This essay seeks to connect the insistence on performance in Yeats’s poetry of the 1920s to the performativity of violence in the foundation of the state. Yeats’s emphasis on the performative or declarative utterance, which he links explicitly to acts of founding violence, and the pattern by which throughout the later poetry, performance of the poems enforces decisions on certain cruxes of meaning, connects his poetic mode to the problem of founding political violence in the Irish war of decolonization and the subsequent civil war. But it also links Yeats’s authoritarian political leanings, and in particular his consistent emphasis on the relation between taking life and the legitimacy of the state, to his German contemporaries, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. The correlation between Yeats’s political thinking and,the poetry together with his intellectual affinities with European understandings of political violence, suggest that far from aberrantly flirting with fascism, shows a deep understanding of its implications for the idea of the liberal and the postcolonial state.
This past December, a conference was held in Ramallah, entitled: “Walter Benjamin in Palestine: O... more This past December, a conference was held in Ramallah, entitled: “Walter Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought”. David Lloyd reports here on that conference, which was organized to honor the Palestinian call to boycott Israeli academic institutions and as an alternative to a Benjamin conference being held in the same month, in flagrant violation of that call, at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. But the conference far exceeded that initial rationale: “As the BDS movement continues to advance, perhaps workshops like these, which step beyond mere “severance of relations” (as Benjamin described the act of striking) to shape conditions for new modes of relation, may offer a way to think the future of our resistance to Israeli apartheid. Perhaps too it offers a model also for an alternative to the insidious corporatization of our intellectual and creative lives under the neoliberal dispensation we all confront, wherever we reside, and not only in occupied Palestine.”
This paper seeks to examine the history and practices of incarceration as a mechanism of the libe... more This paper seeks to examine the history and practices of incarceration as a mechanism of the liberal state in relation to a contested and colonial domain, namely, Ireland. Commencing with the period of the formation of the modern British state and the relation between prison reform and political prisoners’ protest, I turn to look at the simultaneity of a discourse on prison architectures and on [the welfare of] prisoner’s bodies. The long-standing concern of the state with the structures of incarceration and punishment, on the one hand, and with the welfare of the “reformable” subject on the other provides a context for the prison protests of the 1970s and 1980s in Northern Ireland, of the bureaucratic opposition between the “ordinary decent criminal” [ODC] and the recalcitrant political prisoner, of the nature of a protest that deploys both the reduced “bare life” of the body and the very architecture of the prison against the logic of “criminalization” of political prisoners.
To date, apparently, no major Western women’s or feminist organization has declared its solidarit... more To date, apparently, no major Western women’s or feminist organization has declared its solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. This introduction argues that the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation and for rights, justice and equality is a fundamentally feminist issue. It is so both on the grounds of the traditions of international solidarity that have been central to feminisms that are also anti-racist and anti-imperialist and because Israel’s occupation and legalized system of discrimination targets the reproduction of Palestinian life in the fullest sense, not only as biological life but also in the larger sense of the social and cultural. The paper concludes by arguing that the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel is a crucial intervention which, in consistency with feminist theory and practice, feminists internationally should endorse and act upon.
Discourse on Israel, both propagandistic and analytical, has the peculiar tendency of representin... more Discourse on Israel, both propagandistic and analytical, has the peculiar tendency of representing it at one moment as normal – a normal democracy, a normal Western society, a normal state – and at others as exceptional: a democracy uniquely embattled among hostile neighbors, a secular state that historically fulfills the religious destiny of a people, a democracy that defines itself as a state for a single people and religion, the only democracy in the region, and so forth. At times, defenders of Israel lay claim to its normality as the reason to exempt it from the norms of human rights and international law, at others complain that Israel is being ‘singled out’ for criticism. This paper argues that these apparent contradictions, over and above their value to public relations opportunism, can best be explained by understanding Israel’s occupation of Palestine as an exemplary settler colonial project whose contradictions are embedded in the early framing of Zionism and whose unfolding follows a logic long ago analyzed by Albert Memmi and other theorists of settler colonialism.
It is often assumed that while both capitalism and the modern state may originate in processes su... more It is often assumed that while both capitalism and the modern state may originate in processes such as primitive accumulation, imperialism and colonialism, and conquest, modernization in both the political and economic spheres gradually leaves those stages behind, allowing for some form of cosmopolitan transnational globality to emerge. In particular, settler colonialism and primitive accumulation have been understood to belong to early stages of capital expansion and accordingly to be formations lodged in the past. This introduction argues that the ongoing history of settler colonialism forms a crucial terrain through which to understand military occupation and the formations and practices of the neoliberal state that has emerged to regulate and promote a new regime of accumulation. It also explores the ways in which the formations of the contemporary state, whether military, economic, political, legal or cultural, may remain grounded in apparently peripheral or outmoded modes of domination. Understanding the neoliberal regime of accumulation in terms of its continuing debt to such histories will have a crucial bearing on the organization and articulation of resistance and dissent in the present.
Ngugi in the American Imperium, ed. Timothy J. Reiss, 2021
This essay revisits the chapter "Quest for Relevance" in Ngũgĩ's classic Decolonizing the Mind in... more This essay revisits the chapter "Quest for Relevance" in Ngũgĩ's classic Decolonizing the Mind in order to argue that the revision of the English literary curriculum at Nairobi University that it discusses still offers a highly dynamic model for rethinking "English" in the present. Its principal contribution is the spatialization of the idea of the curriculum, displacing the historicist model of literary pedagogy with one that foregrounds the intersectional relations between various literary traditions and languages.
When Politics Are Sacralized: International Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, 2021
This essay addresses the ambivalent relation of Irish Protestantism to settler identity in the po... more This essay addresses the ambivalent relation of Irish Protestantism to settler identity in the post-1922 period. In the Republic, Irish Protestants accommodated to the new state and majority Catholic government; in Northern Ireland, “a Protestant state for a Protestant people” took on the forms of a settler-colonial state. Protestant supremacy expressed itself in triumphalist cultural forms and in legalized and informal discrimination against Catholics. Northern Ireland offers a “laboratory” for the formations of the settler colony that clarifies the tendencies of settler-colonial entities: the necessary supremacism or racism, the sectarianization of working-class allegiances, the disproportionately violent response of the state to the demand for rights, and the necessity for the withdrawal of “mother country” support for a peace process to begin. Northern Ireland highlights how settler mentalities are the effect of a structure of dominance, not an unchangeable given. Analogies with Palestine/Israel are frequently invoked and the Northern Irish peace process might suggest a just way to end Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Northern Ireland indicates that the entrenched structures of racial or ethnic supremacy in settler-colonial societies are not necessarily permanent or endemic, but capable of transformation if relations of domination are dismantled.
One feature of contemporary Irish poetry and of the preponderance of the criticism it has spawned... more One feature of contemporary Irish poetry and of the preponderance of the criticism it has spawned makes it singular among contemporary Anglophone poetries: its resolutely anti-theoretical, not to say anti-intellectual bias. Where rigorous and sometimes acrimonious debate and radical formal variation has invigorated the post-war poetry and poetics in the United Kingdom, in the United States or the Caribbean, Irish poetry has for the most part remained peculiarly sheltered from such challenges. Criticism, which ought to furnish theoretical stimulus and self-reflection, has tended to be at its most acrimonious the more it has advocated for a poetic conservatism whose time, one would have thought, is by now all too well outworn. This shell into which Irish poetry repeatedly withdraws in intellectual renunciation coincides with the niche that it has been assigned in the global market of Anglophone poetry. Irish poetry occupies a peculiar nook, long secured for it by the retailing of rural and decaying industrial backdrops and by their correlatives, the insistent formalism and programmatic adherence to the constancy of “voice” that has dogged poetic production since Yeats, while tamely eschewing the rigorous violence that sustained his magisterial verse. This essay seeks to foreground a handful of Irish poets—Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian and Catherine Walsh—for whom form is not an arbitrary or given container, but the specific shape poetic thinking takes in moving through the materials, linguistic and historical at once, that it takes on.
This essay begins to explore the relationship of the production and dissolution of meaning in lyr... more This essay begins to explore the relationship of the production and dissolution of meaning in lyric and the analogous production and dissolution of law in the moment of violence, typically the coup [el golpe] or, as Yeats put it in the poem “Leda and the Swan”, “the sudden blow” that inaugurates history’s regimes. Yeats’s “Leda”, published in 1923, is notoriously a poem that addresses the violence out of which a civilization—that of the modern West—traces its origins or foundations. This essay focuses, by way of contrast, on the Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s contemporaneous poem “Vusco volvvver de golpe el golpe”, the ninth lyric in Vallejo’s highly experimental volume Trilce of 1922. The poem is profoundly enigmatic in every regard, but seems to operate as a meditation on the intersection of sexual and political violence and to engage in a continuous proliferation and dissolution of meaning through strategies of multiplication of meaning and of neologism, distortion and pun. The poem thus seems to challenge any limit on reading (the sort of “tact” of knowing where to stop that William Empson famously counseled at the end of Seven Types of Ambiguity) and to constitute a kind of counter-violence to the violence of the law that seeks to put a limit or determination on interpretation. Potentially, the paper opens onto what Frantz Fanon once referred to as “social psychosis” and opens a further potential discussion of psychosis as a model for generative poetic meaning. In contrast with “Leda and the Swan”, Trilce IX does not sublimate the violence of the sexual or of the political into the figure of a power/knowledge relation that founds a new law or a new state, but diffuses the violence into a state of exhaustion that supposes a reiteration rather than a reproduction of foundation. Nonetheless, both poems in their similarities as in their differences, raise the question of the profound intimacy of poetry to violence and to the law alike and offers the sketch of a counter-principle to the common conception of literary work as an institutional practice within a nationalist or anti-colonial context.
This essay explores the "baroque" aesthetic of the contemporary Irish experimental poet Trevor Jo... more This essay explores the "baroque" aesthetic of the contemporary Irish experimental poet Trevor Joyce, thinking the baroque via the work of Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze and Arnold Hauser, and argues that his work develops from its early citation of baroque motifs in the volume Pentahedron to the deployment of baroque procedures in later work like Rome's Wreck. The baroque and its counterpart, mannerism, are understood here as critical procedures that undo standardized forms of literary practice, rather than as epochal stylistic tendencies.
This essay analyzes Irish poet James Clarence Mangan’s translation of Ludwig Uhland’s Auf der Üb... more This essay analyzes Irish poet James Clarence Mangan’s translation of Ludwig Uhland’s Auf der Überfahrt. Mangan’s poem, “Spirits Everywhere”, finds its justification produces a metacommentary on the practice of translation as oversetting, Übersetzung. It is not an equivalent, if by that term be meant a transposition of the words of one language into those that correspond semantically to them. It is, however, a reflection on the process and effect of translation understood as a crossing over, a crossing that proliferates meaning rather than seeking to be definitive and that, in doing so, holds out the prospect of innumerable possible versions, in each and none of which the spirit of the original would be reflected back as yet another. Every translation, we might say, is the apparition of the poem, and as such a secondary form that owes its life to another and yet haunts the original that it displaces.
This essay discusses W.B. Yeats's relation to Irish nationalism and to colonialism and postcoloni... more This essay discusses W.B. Yeats's relation to Irish nationalism and to colonialism and postcolonialism. Evaluating Edward Said's and Seamus Deane's classic essays on the topic, it argues that Yeats's career falls roughly into two periods, stylistically as well as politically. The predominantly symbolist mode of his early poetry, dedicated to the shaping of heterosexual desire as a model for nationalist desire for the nation, gives way after 1916 to an allegorical or emblematic mode tied to the will and performative utterances. The fact that the bulk of Yeats's major poetry was written after 1922 and the founding of the Irish Free state not only makes him an early instance of a fully "postcolonial poet", but also means that his later poetry, devoted to the question of state formation and violence, raises important questions about the nature of postcolonial state formation..
This essay discusses how Samuel Beckett’s writing works Irish material and brings it into relatio... more This essay discusses how Samuel Beckett’s writing works Irish material and brings it into relation to other materials with which it resonates. What can we learn from his particular engagement with the matter of Irishness that might help us to think more extensively about the practices of (Irish) cultural studies? Working on Beckett is peculiarly difficult, and therefore, perhaps, instructive to cultural studies precisely because of his notorious formal recalcitrance to the referential tendencies of the field. His oeuvre is so devoted to the dismantling of the adequacy of both representation and reference in all their dimensions that it resists from the outset any reading that would seek to draw from the work a stable cultural or political reference to Irish matter. So what is the form of Irishness with which Beckett works? To what extent can we establish a limit or boundary within which alone a given content can be construed as Irish? Again, to what extent are the forms in which Beckett works to be understood in some relation to identifiably Irish forms and traditions? And if it is a Joycean model that has lent itself so effectively to the current paradigms of Irish studies, giving rise to a space in which subaltern cultural memories are articulated through and with the forms of official Irish culture, what alternative model, or constellation of elements, does Beckett suggest for Irish cultural studies? I suggest that the Irish elements, in order to be fully comprehended and placed in conjunction with the conditions of modernity—progress, development, rationality—that they engage and critique, must be constellated with the entire range of referents that Beckett’s allusive textuality invokes. It becomes possible to conceive of the Irish dimension of Beckett not in terms of its insularity or belatedness but as an element among others in constant reference to one another. The very notion of reference, in other words, demands to be rethought not in terms of a referring to, as if to some stable signified in the world that delimits and limits the text’s possible range of meaning, but of a referring on or referrance—a continual process of displacement that links each element of the text to a network of allusive and allusive connections that in turn lead on to other nodes and connections.
Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism, 2022
This study puts contemporary Irish poetry in dialogue with major debates and concerns of European... more This study puts contemporary Irish poetry in dialogue with major debates and concerns of European and American poetics. David Lloyd tracks the traits of Irish poetic modernism, from fragmentation to the suspicion of representation, to nineteenth-century responses to the rapid and unsettling effects of Ireland’s precocious colonial modernity, such as language loss and political violence. He argues that Irish poetry’s inventiveness is driven by the need to find formal means to engage with historical conditions that take from the writer the customary certainties of cultural continuity, identity and aesthetic or personal autonomy, rather than by poetic innovation for its own sake. This reading of Irish poetry understands the innovative impetus that persists through Irish poetry since the nineteenth century as a counterpoetics of modernity. Opening with chapters on Mangan and Yeats, the book then turns to detailed discussions of Trevor Joyce, Maurice Scully, and Catherine Walsh; major Irish contemporary poets never before the focus of a book-length study.
Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics, 2019
Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics
David Lloyd
“If there is any hope for t... more Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics
David Lloyd
“If there is any hope for the human, and if the idea of the human is of any use to the enactment of that hope, then the aesthetic claims and categories through which the human and its subjects are exalted and degraded must be placed under the most violent and most loving scrutiny. Under Representation exemplifies such scrutiny. The rigorous care with which David Lloyd examines and challenges the entanglement of race, representation and the aesthetic is irresistible and indispensable. Under Representation is a major, and singular, achievement.”—Fred Moten, New York University
Under Representation shows how the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy ground the racial order of the modern world in our concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity. In taking on the relation of aesthetics to race, Lloyd challenges the absence of sustained thought about race in postcolonial studies, as well as the lack of sustained attention to aesthetics in critical race theory.
Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful “racial regime of representation” whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is not just about depiction of diverse humans or inclusion in political or cultural institutions. It is an activity that undergirds the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social.
Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory: The racialized remain “under representation,” on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present. Across five chapters, Under Representation investigates the aesthetic foundations of modern political subjectivity; race and the sublime; the logic of assimilation and the stereotype; the subaltern critique of representation; and the place of magic and the primitive in modernist concepts of art, aura and representation.
Both a genealogy and an account of our present, Under Representation ultimately helps show how a political reading of aesthetics can help us build a racial politics adequate for the problems we face today, one that stakes claims more radical than multicultural demands for representation.
Samuel Beckett once described "Texts for Nothing" as "the grisly after-birth of' The Unnamable', ... more Samuel Beckett once described "Texts for Nothing" as "the grisly after-birth of' The Unnamable', and critics seem to have unhesitatingly aligned themselves with this negative judgment, seeing in this work the expression of an impasse in Beckett's creation. Faced with this perception, the present volume – complementing the book of annotations that precedes it in our series – aims to assert its importance, to make its wealth and beauty to be heard, with a view to raise new interest in this corpus. The latter is distinguished by the uniqueness of its æsthetics, also representing a moment of deepening and renewal of Beckett's writing. A reading of the third volume of the Letters, and a study of the links between Beckett and Lacan complete this volume.
These are the abstracts for the special issue of the Irish University Review on contemporary expe... more These are the abstracts for the special issue of the Irish University Review on contemporary experimental poetry in Ireland (see also my introduction to the volume posted here).
This volume publishes essays on and poetry by some of Ireland's foremost experimental poets, work... more This volume publishes essays on and poetry by some of Ireland's foremost experimental poets, working in the modernist traditions. Abstracts of the essays are separately uploaded.
This is the introduction to Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre, just published by Edinburgh Un... more This is the introduction to Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre, just published by Edinburgh University Press. Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. In this monograph, I explore what Beckett saw in their paintings, showing what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett’s visual imagination is based on his criticism and on close analysis of the paintings he viewed. I show how Beckett’s fascination with these painters illuminates the ‘painterly’ qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett’s highly visual dramatic work.
A review essay on Fred Moten's trilogy of essays, consent not to be a single being: Black and Blu... more A review essay on Fred Moten's trilogy of essays, consent not to be a single being: Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and The Universal Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
A Review of Ronit Lentin’s Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism an... more A Review of Ronit Lentin’s Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism and Noura Erakat’s Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
This interview about my new book, Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre (Edinburgh UP 2016) just ... more This interview about my new book, Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre (Edinburgh UP 2016) just appeared at rhystranter.com.
This link is to the American Quarterly's "Beyond the Page" online supplement and includes both th... more This link is to the American Quarterly's "Beyond the Page" online supplement and includes both the video recording of a panel in honor of the late Patrick Wolfe, historian and settler colonial theorist, and a number of video recordings of Patrick himself, speaking or being interviewed. The ASA panel consisted of Cynthia G. Franklin, Jean M. O'Brien, Robin D.G. Kelley, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Saree Makdisi, and David Lloyd.
Uploads
Papers by David Lloyd
Résumé Cet essai met en relief quelques points de confluence esthétique peu remarqués entre Samuel Beckett et deux de ses contemporains juif-roumains d' expression allemande, le poète Paul Celan et le peintre Avigdor Arikha.
his poetic mode to the problem of founding political violence in the Irish war of decolonization and the subsequent civil war. But it also links Yeats’s authoritarian political leanings, and in particular his consistent emphasis on the relation between
taking life and the legitimacy of the state, to his German contemporaries, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. The correlation between Yeats’s political thinking and,the poetry together with his intellectual affinities with European understandings of political violence, suggest that far from aberrantly flirting with fascism, shows a deep understanding of its implications for the idea of the liberal and the postcolonial
state.
Résumé Cet essai met en relief quelques points de confluence esthétique peu remarqués entre Samuel Beckett et deux de ses contemporains juif-roumains d' expression allemande, le poète Paul Celan et le peintre Avigdor Arikha.
his poetic mode to the problem of founding political violence in the Irish war of decolonization and the subsequent civil war. But it also links Yeats’s authoritarian political leanings, and in particular his consistent emphasis on the relation between
taking life and the legitimacy of the state, to his German contemporaries, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. The correlation between Yeats’s political thinking and,the poetry together with his intellectual affinities with European understandings of political violence, suggest that far from aberrantly flirting with fascism, shows a deep understanding of its implications for the idea of the liberal and the postcolonial
state.
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-counterpoetics-of-modernity.html
David Lloyd
“If there is any hope for the human, and if the idea of the human is of any use to the enactment of that hope, then the aesthetic claims and categories through which the human and its subjects are exalted and degraded must be placed under the most violent and most loving scrutiny. Under Representation exemplifies such scrutiny. The rigorous care with which David Lloyd examines and challenges the entanglement of race, representation and the aesthetic is irresistible and indispensable. Under Representation is a major, and singular, achievement.”—Fred Moten, New York University
Under Representation shows how the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy ground the racial order of the modern world in our concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity. In taking on the relation of aesthetics to race, Lloyd challenges the absence of sustained thought about race in postcolonial studies, as well as the lack of sustained attention to aesthetics in critical race theory.
Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful “racial regime of representation” whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is not just about depiction of diverse humans or inclusion in political or cultural institutions. It is an activity that undergirds the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social.
Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory: The racialized remain “under representation,” on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present. Across five chapters, Under Representation investigates the aesthetic foundations of modern political subjectivity; race and the sublime; the logic of assimilation and the stereotype; the subaltern critique of representation; and the place of magic and the primitive in modernist concepts of art, aura and representation.
Both a genealogy and an account of our present, Under Representation ultimately helps show how a political reading of aesthetics can help us build a racial politics adequate for the problems we face today, one that stakes claims more radical than multicultural demands for representation.
Irish University Review 46.1 (2016): Irish Experimental Poetry
http://www.euppublishing.com/toc/iur/46/1
Irish University Review 46.1 (2016): Irish Experimental Poetry
http://www.euppublishing.com/toc/iur/46/1
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-beckett-039-s-thing-hb.html
https://rhystranter.com/2017/03/28/samuel-beckett-and-painting/
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-beckett-039-s-thing-hb.html