InEnemies of the EnlightenmentDarrin McMahon details the witchhunt-like hysteria fanned by eighteenth-century French obscurantist clergy, aristocrats, Sorbonne-censoringpenseurs,and other representatives of the ancien régime challenged by a progressive generation of thinkers and writers (les philosophes) who argued that reason, truth, and knowledge are universal pursuits based on universal human faculties. My intellectual and political interests are not confined within the eighteenth-century French worldview or, more generally, within the European Enlightenment, a fascinating yet veritable mélange of progressive and reactionary figures and outlooks. However, McMahon’s scholarly reconstruction of the struggle of obscurantism against scientifically oriented thought in France...

I begin at the beginning: what constitutes the self? Of course, I’m not the fi rst to ask this, nor will I be the last. However, I begin with this seemingly limitless domain of inquiry—approached from so many disciplinary angles, such as history, philosophy, political science, sociology, economics, linguistics, biology, physics, chemistry—because when all is said and done, all of the chapters that make up this book wind back to the many cultural webs we spin out of our selves in the transformation of (our) nature.

In this chapter I will first outline several of the main critical...

In the last chapter, I discussed briefly how, one way or another, a Cartesian and/or Kantian approach to the self and world leads to idealist and/or relativist epistemological dead-ends. In this chapter, I explore more generally how speculative and idealist formulations of language, knowledge, and the self inform much of the theory circulating in humanities departments today that seeks to identify positions of resistance and reclamation within the straightjacket of a so-called late capitalism. To do so, I discuss Sigmund Freud’s metapyschological formulations—The Ego and the Id(hydraulic energies of the id, ego, and superego),Beyond the Pleasure Principle...

While teaching a graduate seminar in Michigan and Boulder one semester, I realized that behind the grand theoretical posturing—usually a third- or fourth-generation blend of Derrida, Foucault, or Lacan— were students thirsting for a more concrete understanding of buzz concepts and formulations. I suggested we detour from the readings on our syllabus and go directly to the source. While I mention concepts formulated in other works of Derrida, the chapter is centrally inspired by our reading of two articles that form bookends to Derrida’s intellectual career: “Th e Ends of Man” (1969) and “For a justice to come” (2004)...

Geopolitics, biopower, biopolitics, subnation, postnation, empire, and a string of other terms slip easily from my graduate students’ tongues and off the pages of scholarly tomes lining library bookshelves today. This chapter is in part a response to these terms deployed rapid-fire by my students and often appearing in Left identified scholarship. I seek to clarify and understand better what these buzzwords actuallymeanin the face of our seemingly speedy spiral towards absolute barbarism: skyrocketing unemployment and homelessness rates, delirious dissipation of basic civil rights, and gaping genocidal wounds worldwide.

The rigors of reasoned method and clear thinking to...

Ever since my undergraduate days as an English major at UC Berkeley, when chapters onOrientalismwere required reading in many upperdivision courses, I’ve been a great admirer of Edward Said. Unlike otherau couranttheorists, Said was refreshing: his accessible erudition and sharp-edged writing style sliced cleanly through a seemingly autochthonous, gelatinous mass of theoretical obscurantism. That he was one of a handful of politically inclined academics in the United States—from the mid-1970s till his death in 2003 he stuck his neck out to defend the Palestinian underdog against a tyrannical Israeli government—made him especially unique and...

Modernity this, modernity that, the cup runneth over with modernity. It’s seemingly everywhere I turn: in the books I read, conferences I attend, dissertations filed¹—and in many a graduate student exhalation. Yet, I’m still not sure what exactly it defines or identifies.

The Oxford English Dictionarydates the first appearance of the wordmodernityto 1635, when it was used to describe the condition of being modern (in character or style); and dates another appearance of the word to the turn of the twentieth century, when it was used to describe the “intellectual tendency or social perspective characterized by...

I begin this chapter with questions that are very much on the tip of people’s tongues, people who are interested in the humanities and the role of the scholar in society. In my classes, students ask, Why become a professor—especially of literature? Why devote years and years of study to a profession that, in the best of cases, will land you a job somewhere you least expect (with little pay) and that seemingly has little consequence on the progressive shaping of an already decrepit reality? My students are not alone here. In the Modern Language Association’s 2006 publication of...

In classes I’ve taught in Latin American literature in English translation, I am inevitably asked, “Is the meaning of the translation different from that of the original?” or, “Are we reading Gabriel García Márquez’sOne Hundred Years of Solitudeor someone else’s version?” My answers seemed too simple: the content is the same but the form is different; you’re reading Márquez’s content and the translator Gregory Rabassa’s form. This just raised more questions about form and content—their separability or inseparability.

My ideas on translation especially seemed to fall short aft er I received an invitation a couple of years...

There’s much interest in the cultural study of Other music: from East LA Chicano rap, U.S./Mexico border Norteño-techno, to Turkish-German hip-hop. Such interest can lead to interesting musical encounters that give rise to new rhythmic expressions; it can tell us something, too, of distributional paths governed by global capitalism. However, just like the dominant trend in approaches to the study of the self, society, language, translation, and cultural phenomena thus far discussed, so here too we see an enduring presence of a philosophical idealism. Whether identified as an alternative literacy program, as a politics of resistance to global capitalism, or...

“My political work takes place when I teach my students how to be critical of racist stereotypes in film; it takes place when I affirm positive representations in our culture,” a graduate student declared during a seminar. I had pushed the students a little, asking where we might find proof that scholarly “cultural work” had led to political change. I had asked the question because in one way or another, having an allout faith in representations, students would make mind-blowingly smart and sophisticated rhetorical moves to argue either the text’s assertion of a transformative politics of resistance or its normalizing...

Often the students in my courses on postcolonial (Latin American and otherwise) literature and film, one way or another, begin to question whether or not a given fictional narrative can open eyes to injustices in the world or act as anticolonial manual, especially when the characters they encounter are ethically twisted and contradictory. In some form or other, they ask how the study of a postcolonial phenomenon like Latin American literature can make visible past and present conditions of exploitation and oppression. They delve into questions of genre and style: Is realism or magicorealism more politically resistant or conformist to...

In a recent undergraduate course I taught on postcolonial literature I assigned my students J. M. Coetzee’sDisgrace.I chose the book not only for its masterful use of a third-person present tense voice, but because it offers a filtered look at postapartheid South Africa through the eyes of a middle-aged, white South African, David Lurie. At this stage in the course, this type of narrative presented a radical shift from the South Asian, Caribbean, and Maori voices we had encountered.Disgraceput the students on a terrain where their sense of justice and injustice, freedom and confinement was turned...

This chapter is inspired by that moment (usually midway through a semester of teaching an upper-division literature course filled with mostly smart and curious English majors) when brows furrow quizzically and that mental ticker-tape starts clicking: Why are we reading and analyzing books when no one I know even reads? Why not get up to speed with the times and analyze something more relevant, like film? What value does this all have in the bigger scheme of things anyway? I usually take pause from the work at hand and throw the question back out to the students. They come up...

In response to a conference on the role of theory in society held at the University of Chicago on April 11, 2003, theNew York Timesreporter Emily Eakin concluded, “These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century—psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism—have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the left ist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating” (9).¹ In this chapter I look at how several scholars have responded to...