Search

Mikko Tuhkanen's provocative and comprehensive study of the work of Leo Bersani deserves the status of a decisive and paradigm-shifting event in the field of critical theory. Bersani's work, which has evolved over a period of over fifty years, emerges as something like a Trojan Horse within the hegemonic camp of critical theory for which only difference and alterity are positive and mobile. Tukhanen draws out and in so doing sharpens Bersani's consistent call for a radical re-assessment of precisely those concepts and values connoted as negative, redundant, static, or even politically and ethically dangerous in the broad orthodoxy of critical theory: sameness, essence, narcissism, the speculative. Tuhkanen shows adeptly, through a series of engagements with Bersani's preferred critical objects -- Baudelaire, Freud, Proust, Beckett, Jean Laplanche, to name only those most prominent -- how Bersani, the "essentialist villain," has wielded the critical armory of essence against, but also within, the domain of what is construed as a pervasive ontology of loss, lack, and trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book "After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France," edited by Julian Bourg.

The article reviews the book "The Perverse Art of Reading: On the Phantasmatic Semiology in Roland Barthes’ ‘Cours au Colle`ge de France,’" by Kris Pint, number 353 in the Faux titre book series.

A review of the book "Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics," edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts is presented.

Reviews the book "Laclau: A Critical Reader," edited by Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart.

Reviews the book 'Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit,' by Leslie Hill.

Reviews the book 'Roger Laporte: The Orphic Text,' by Ian Maclachlan.

Reviews the book 'Modern European Thinkers: Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction,' by Benjamin Noys.

Reviews the book 'Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin,' by Peter Tracey Connor.

The article reviews the book "Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry," by Christophe Wall-Romana, part of the "Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics" book series.

A review of the book "Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late 20th-Century French Thought," by Christina Howells is presented.

The article presents an excerpt from the July 2010 issue of "French Studies" that presents a review of the book "The Dismembered Community: Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, and the Remains of Laure," by Milo Sweedler.