CR: The New Centennial Review

The Remains of Time and History in Literature and Skepticism

2024-10-25T17:48:03-04:00

This article takes up Pablo Oyarzún's discussion of the connection between literature and skepticism, looking closely at works by Walter Benjamin and Jorge Luis Borges in addition to Oyarzún's 2022 monograph.

Doing Justice to Critical Thought from the Global South

2024-08-29T16:07:44-04:00

This article examines three publications by Pablo Oyarzún recently translated into English, Doing Justice, Between Celan and Heidegger, and Literature and Skepticism. It posits that although Doing Justice is associated with a project on critical thought from the global south, we should be careful about what we expect from such a regionalist designation. Oyarzún's works concern geopolitical issues, but, following the work of Walter Benjamin, they do so in a way that resists instrumentalization. Instead, they repeatedly stress the need to suspend accepted forms of knowledge and communication to make room for different ways of thinking and understanding the world.

The Question Behind the Word

2024-06-20T12:15:46-04:00

Thinkers since the early modern period have posited a machine or being manipulating symbols in a way that pragmatically works to achieve an outcome but can do so without understanding or experiencing what the outcome is about. This paper identifies an implicit assumption underlying these thought experiments no matter what side of the debate their creators are on. The assumption is that a string of words in a certain order presents human listeners or readers with a question as to the nature or cause of their taking that order, and that the question takes the form not of searching for a natural law, or tracing a sequence of events, or expounding on an instinctual behavior, but of positing the presence or absence of a creating agent behind the words. The form of this question has, in the context of western culture, a historical specificity to it, one that the Chilean philosopher Pablo Oyarzún has located at the nexus of two concepts: literature and skepticism. In this paper I explain what I take to be his interpretation of that nexus, offer a thesis as to its historical specificity and, finally ask what Oyarzún’s exposition of literature and skepticism might tell us about what is at stake when we ask whether machines can think.

Of Monstrous Intimacy

2025-11-26T15:28:29-05:00

Lithium and Mania in the Andes

2025-09-24T16:02:40-04:00

A Conversation: The Legacy of Freudian Nachträglichkeit in U.S. Literary Critical Discourse

2025-11-26T05:45:01-05:00

While Nachträglichkeit would be considered by later French thinkers as one of the most important concepts within the Freudian apparatus, what makes this term (and its afterlife) so compelling—and complicated—is that Freud never raised it to the level of a concept, thus opening it to various (mis)translations and (mis)readings. The narrative of après-coup’s postwar French reception is well known; less explored is the story of this quasi-concept’s integration into U.S. humanities departments, its flourishing at Yale in the 70s, and, finally, how it became both more generalized and more consolidated as a term related to trauma studies in the 90s. This article traces this history to interrogate the conflation of the logic of Nachträglichkeit with the belated temporality of trauma. Turning to two films, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), as exemplary instances of the temporality of trauma narratives and of Nachträglichkeit respectively, I argue that attending to the singular logic of Nachträglichkeit allows other narrative (or even non-narrative) possibilities to become available to us that resist the ethical imperatives of trauma studies.

Nation as Noir

2025-08-01T23:04:37-04:00

Critics have long pitted Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep (2000) against China’s state-run propaganda for telling a different WWII story but left the film’s dubious generic status unattended. Epic, drama, comedy, and tragedy are mixed up in it to present an insane mood swing Ma Dasan, the protagonist, undergoes when seeking a POW exchange for food with the Japanese military. As a comic character, Ma is designed to emulate Ah Q, but unlike him Ma grows from a peasant into a citizen in his negotiating effort one would adopt in a liberal democracy. But since this is wartime, his comic self-assuredness ends up inviting the Japanese to annihilate his village, ending the film in bitterness typical of a film noir. Ma’s struggle to cope with the collective insinuates how citizens struggle today for justice in China. The struggle is mirrored by Devils’ generic hodgepodge, which in turn incenses the party-state, for it goes against melodrama as the state-dictated genre to tell wartime stories. Northrop Frye’s theory of melodrama as an art form preferred by the police state is employed to explain how Devils tears the party-state apart that conceals the reality of the Chinese nation as a noir world.

Another Non-Cartesian Sum

2025-05-28T13:46:45-04:00

This is a riff on Charles Mills’ essay, “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African American Experience.” Picking up from Mills’ own riff of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, I want to follow the play of subjectivity and subjection found in Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. From their starkly different subject-positions, they express seemingly opposed forms of modern subjectivity. Rather than opposition, however, I take a cue from Fred Moten and place them in apposition. There are four parts, each divided in two. First, I summarize Mill’s essay and then Jacobs’ narrative. Second, I look at what it means for Descartes and Jacobs to “say I” from their respective discursive positions and to the landscape of cognitive objects, on which the Cartesian cogito and Jacobsian incognito collide. Third, I discuss the specific kind of fugitivity in Jacobs’ sum (“I am”), which I call “steganotology,” and consider vectors of possession and dispossession therein. Fourth, I compare the two genres of writing – meditation and slave narrative – which leads to Hortense Spiller’s sense of “ungendering.” Finally, I conclude by reading the Jacobsian sum as a means for sabotaging subjectivity from above and below the Cartesian grid.

From Textualism to the Slave Community: Reappraising the African American Freedom Narrative

2024-02-29T14:55:10-05:00

Abstract

Extending over its nearly two-hundred year history as a militant literary genre, the African American freedom narrative has been construed in different ways over time by antebellum abolitionists, WPA folklorists and social scientists, 1970s historians, and 1980s literary critics, with remarkably little cross-fertilization. Herein I offer a condensed history of three major moments in which this major text type was reappraised and its relevance redefined. In the closing section, as a critique of the textualist drift spearheaded in the 1980s and 1990s by scholars of the linguistic turn, I offer a new interpretation consonant with the political turn of the Black Lives Matter movement, one that encourages us to reconnect these freedom narratives to the communities from which the fugitive authors came.