CR: The New Centennial Review

Editor's Note

2023-10-22T22:57:22-04:00

The Very Thought of Sex

2022-02-17T13:31:36-05:00

King David or Queen Esther or Jesus or Peter: Transphobic Terror in Jane Campion's 'Power of the Dog'

2023-08-10T03:15:11-04:00

A transphoic subtext supercedes a homophoic pretext in Jane Campion's Power of the Dog. The big reveal of the film that apparently explains everything that is wrong on the ranch and the world—Phil is secretly homosexual—effectively defuses the threat posed by the urbane "homo" three decades later in films such as Hitchcock's Rope. But the unlikely hero of the film, Peter, the wannabe surgeon and sissifed stepson of Phil's brother, is positioned outside and above the scene of familal bliss that his murder of Phil made possible. Protecting his mother was Peter's self-announced means to becoming a "real" man. But the Biblical quote from which the title is taken and is repeated by Peter at film's end asignals his many cross identifications with all those from the Bible who have uttered the same words: male, female, and even those coming out: That is, the hero transgresses stable markers of idenity to save the ranch from the film's apparent anti-hero Phil, only to remain a figure with proven homicidal instincts looming on the margins of the family. While not strictly a prefiguration of Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho, Peter announces a similar threat posed by trans people.

Black Antaesthetics Against the Spatial (Spatiality as Antiblack Prohibition)

2023-08-10T16:24:26-04:00

Drawing on two texts by Canadian writer and theorist Dionne Brand (A Map to the Door of No Return, 2001; Ossuaries, 2010), this article argues for an understanding of spatiality as immanent antiblack prohibition—the prohibition of spatiality to blackness—that simultaneously engenders spatial becoming as actualization, embodiment, the flesh, and stratification. The article elaborates these four formulations of immanent space through the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze (and his collaborator Félix Guattari) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and through a re-reading of Fanon’s critique of Merleau-Ponty, via a Deleuzian formulation of the actual and the virtual. Within this elaboration, prohibition indicates less the act of an agent, or individual or institutional player within political-juridical discourse or practice, and more an ontological process or operation. By constellating black thinkers of space and antiblackness (Brand, McKittrick, Fanon) with philosophers of the spatial and becoming (Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty), the essay charts the immanent location of the antiblack operation of prohibition, its always-prior enactment of a differentiation that enables and marks the spatial as (antiblack) process. The essay then elaborates how, taking up Fanon’s project in Black Skin White Masks (1952), Brand proceeds farther on, composing a poetics that itself works against space and time. Subverting Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, the essay theorizes Brand’s elaboration in Ossuaries as a literary antaesthetics that disorders and dismantles distinction, relationality, differentiation, and difference within the work, and implies the threat of the same radical disorganization beyond the scope of the literary.

The Ruse of Love

2023-08-09T17:54:14-04:00

This essay offers a sustained critique of Bridgerton as symptomatic of the broader trend toward post-racial or multi-racial historical fantasy. By examining the discrete constructions of sex-gender and race in the TV series, this paper asks what does the consolidation of sex-gender in contradistinction to race reveal about contemporary investments in positioning (white) gender as the foundational, immutable category of violation? The point is not simply to repeat a critique of ahistoricity and the perfidious desire to reparatively re-read imperialism, but rather to argue that Bridgerton reflects the contemporary impetus to avow race through an economy of spectacle that disavows racial terror. That is, just as slavery is bound to appear in Bridgerton, despite all efforts within the text to disavow its ontological structure, so too is this sublated appearance present within our contemporary cultural landscape. And so, we argue that the desire within Bridgerton to disappear what is ontologically overdetermined, the ongoingness of slavery, paradigmatically reflects our contemporary impulse to imagine a temporal disjuncture between slavery’s past and our present. Thus, precisely because Bridgerton effectively elides slavery, the show serves as an opportunity to explore the ways in which the isolation of slavery as past crowds out its contiguous forms of subjection.

Immanent Critique as a Practice of Transplantation

2023-08-14T15:24:31-04:00

Sovereign Resistance to Reading

2022-04-26T22:41:59-04:00

Marc Crépon's Literature/Philosophy of Nonviolence

2023-04-19T15:49:11-04:00

Four books by Marc Crépon have been published in English in the past decade, presenting an ethical philosophy articulated primarily through engagements with philosophical and literary texts. This article surveys the polyptych constituted by these collections of interpretive essays, providing a characterization of Crépon's theoretical style and an examination of his operative concepts: living-with, murderous consent, violence, and refusal of violence. Crépon’s general notion of violence and the nonviolent first emerges in his sympathetic readings of post-Heideggerian philosophers with an investment in creative writing—Camus, Sartre, Levinas, and Derrida—and gains greater precision through commentary on literary and quasi-literary works. In addition to assessing Crépon’s philosophy of nonviolence with reference to his predecessors, this article gives an account of the role of literature in a critical enterprise that aims at inspiring hope in and ultimately making possible a nonviolent historical epoch.

Homicide as First Philosophy

2023-08-28T18:13:08-04:00

This article focuses on Blanchot's reading of the "Allegory of the Cave" and in particular on the relation between philosophy and murder as described in Plato's Republic. It first shows that Blanchot's writing and way of dealing with the topic of death entails a peculiar reading of Plato's work. Second, it argues that the relation between death and philosophy has to be understood taking into consideration the topic of murder. Finally, it shows that murder in Blanchot contains the law of its prohibition and that it is this very law that dwells within violence that makes possible thinking. Hence, this article focused on Blanchot's reading of the "Allegory of the Cave" shows that philosophy deals with violence in an essential way but more precisely that the possibility of philosophy is located in the law of violence and in what troubles it intrinsically.

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

2022-02-17T14:28:43-05:00

Out of the Cemetery of the Earth, a Resurrective Commons

2022-02-17T14:24:46-05:00